September 13–23, 2004 — Enumerating poultry

At work I’ve been recovering, and most of the time I don’t notice how unproductive I’ve become. In August the projects I was working on seemed endless; now that they’ve ended, I think parts of me are rebelling, deciding they deserve time off. The part most notably absent is the one capable of forcing me to sit down and think about web sites, which is unfortunate because there aren’t many other ways for me to make money.

So I’m dedicating myself to getting more projects in the meantime, hoping that I’ll be able to work if I have deadlines keeping me motivated. Though I guess there’s been a bit of maintenance on other projects going on, too. (I have to stop selling myself short — I think I did 15 minutes of work changing three lines of code one afternoon, and since no one else involved in the project could have made that change, it’s pretty valuable and maybe even worth the afternoon I dedicated to it.)

For a while it looked like things would work out. We were able to bid on a project that was very promising and that was large enough to keep us occupied through to the end of the year. Combined with all the other projects we had going, we would have been pretty comfortable for at least three or four months; it would have been great.

I’m still not sure what went wrong, or if anything went wrong — we still haven’t heard back either way. But I’m increasingly skeptical, and I’m beginning to feel I probably wasted another 20 hours or so working on a proposal that amounted to nothing.

The only thing that got me through writing the proposal was the thought of writing a journal entry about the day we paid off the Doublenaut credit card and finally broke even. But since I still can’t write about that, I’ll have to go back to discussing the joys of trying to drag whatever work I can out of old contacts and past clients. There’s something demoralizing about the entire experience; it’s the sense of failure that comes from admitting that people aren’t always going to come to us.

So far nothing has come of that, either. We’re not desperate yet, but we need to get some internet programming work again so that we can keep paying the bills; nothing else really does it yet.

Maybe we were getting too cocky; maybe we’ve just been unlucky. Some days it’s too much to think about, and I wonder if I might have to get a job on the side, something to pay my rent with and to keep me afloat. Maybe even that wouldn’t be so bad; working retail is an easy way to meet people.

I wonder if I still have the Gap’s phone number from when they called me back after my interview two years ago. I bet girls work there...