Weaning Away From the Last Few Months

If you’re a regular, you’ll notice a new look around here. Yeah, I just need a new change of scenery, like a divorcee who needs to move and get a new car – same feeling, I’m sure. I found a slew of really nice free themes and have been purchasing a few premium themes for my client sites in the last 2 weeks.

Amazingly, this one is completely out of the box, except for deleting the fixed height of the tags line under the posts for when it needs to wrap to two lines. It’s been a mentally and emotionally rough ride the last two weeks, but I’ve got the best wife a guy could ask for and we’re giving this self-employment shot the best shot I can.

For now, I’m booked for the next two weeks solid with quite a few sites/clients in limbo while we discuss their situation and options before they decide to go forward. It’s been strange to only “work” (by that, I mean bill my time) for 2-5 hours per day, but I can say with absolute certaintly that few things are more satisfying than wrapping up a project, getting the PayPal payment, and getting a “thank you” e-mail with a client testimonial for JessePetersen.com. THAT is what work is supposed to be like. It was, and is again.

Hallelujah for that return to normalcy, if there is such a thing.

When it Comes to Compliments… Wow!

I’ve been working for a few weeks on and off on a huge site for a British non-profit. It’s got over 1,400 pages and we’ve encountered script time-outs, shopping cart, user-submitted pages, and other issues that we keep working through and around. Now that we are just a day from launch, he sent me this before heading out for the day:

Perfect solution. Thanks Jesse. I really don’t get why you have been working for other people. You’re damn good – and certainly good enough to be heading your own enterprise.

That was enough to send me to cloud nine for my situation. I think I’ll keep this up a while longer and see what comes about.