godspeed

Okay, to tell the truth, I do actually have access to a shared kitchen.  But I don't have pots & pans right now and hate sharing a kitchen with 10 other people.  So, I am doing all of my cooking in my room.  Here's what I have:

1. Food/Vegetable/Rice Steamer
2. Sunbeam Rocket Grill
3. Crockpot
4. Coffee Maker
5. Dorm-size Refrigerator

So from time-to-time, I'll blog about my experiments with cooking with those limited items.

Breakfast

• Boiled Eggs - cook really well in the steamer.  Just put them in, turn it on, and ignore for 18 minutes.
• Oatmeal - put the oatmeal and water in the bowl that sits in the steamer, then steam it!

Other Meals

• Chili - 1) "Brown" coarse ground beef in the steamer. 2) Put ground beef, thickly sliced mushrooms, canned black beans (drained), canned tomatoes, and chili seasoning in the crockpot and cook.
• Chicken & Steamed Vegies - 1) Put Cinnamon-Chipotle Dry Rub on the chicken breast and grill in the Rocket Grill.  Moist & tasty!  2) Put vegies in the steamer, steam, then top with Italian herbs.

Day Two of the Great Coffeehouse Search was a success!  Muddsuckers Coffee is about 8 blocks from my house (about 3/4 of a mile, maybe?).  That's a great distance to walk for some work time. Nice little hole-in-the-wall grunge coffee shop with an owner who is happy to have the business and introduced himself as soon as I arrived. Perfect!

Weather update:  16 degrees (1 degree w/wind chill), snow showers and partly sunny.  So far there hasn't been much snow and I've been surprised at the number of sunny days. So far it's been bearable, but it's not January, I know...

Good progress yesterday. I didn't complete everything I needed to complete, but I did get the Team Trivia business cards designed and I managed to reproduce the Team Trivia logo in a scalable vector graphic.  What the heck does that mean?  Well, you know when you have a .jpg and you stretch it to make it larger and it just looks fuzzy?  But then you get some graphics that you can stretch and they still look crisp & clean? Well, that is a scalable vector graphic.  This afternoon I will be making phone calls to get pricing on the business cards and also the Trivial Matters (which are the sheets you use to keep track of your score on).

On a more random note, the singer Tom and I went to see before we left (Jamey Johnson) was nominated for three Grammy's last night! Best Male Country Vocal Performance, Best Country Song, and Best Country Album!  We have tickets to see him again in January in Chicago.

Well, I'm ready to wander back to my toasty warm room to do a little more work. Then out & about on errands this afternoon.  I haven't driven my car since Sunday, I think. (Isn't that kewl???).

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Oscar Wilde

Well, my first attempt at finding a "Central Perk"-like coffee shop (remember Friends?) is a bust.  Wilde Roast Cafe is very pretty and will be wonderful for a glass of wine in the evenings, but it's a little too big and busy to be my regular coffee shop.  Yummy coffee, but I think I'll keep looking...

Okay, goals for the day:

1. Finish business card design.
2. Get business cards ordered.
3. Finish updating my resume.
4. Work on my Booking Format (the document formerly known as my sales spiel).  If I can get this well-defined and keep it updated, then as the business grows I can hire a sales person and use it as a guide for them.
5. Check on the status of the Claddagh show
6. Redesign the Trivial Matters sheet
7. Get quotes from 3 or 4 printers for printing the Trivial Matters
8. Do a Brain Dump (get everything I need to do out of my head & on paper)

Well, Day One of a new schedule was a complete bust.  I ended up staying up way too late (2:30am) working on logo designs.  Then more logo design work today & working on my sales call format.  Long & the short of it?  I didn't stick to my schedule at all!

So, here's the plan for tomorrow -- I found a cool little coffee shop about a mile away.  Rather than make coffee here tomorrow, I'm going to walk to Wilde Roast Cafe with my laptop & get out of this room!  We'll see if that makes a difference.

One of my struggles during this transition from the Corporate RatRace to Entrepeneur is having some structure to my day.  During my time in Minneapolis (4 days at the beginning of November and 1 week at the end of November), it was entirely too easy to let the day slip away.  Today, however, is December 1st and I'm ready for a fresh start. So here is my first draft at a schedule:  

• 7:30 am:   Get up, drink coffee
• 8:00 am:   Exercise
• 9:30 am:   Breakfast & Shower
• 10:15 am: Blog
• 10:30 am: Team Trivia "Office Work"
• 12:30 pm: Lunch
• 1:45 pm:   Book Shows or Team Trivia "Office Work"
• 4:45 pm:   Home to Cook Dinner
• 6:00 pm:   MC Trivia Shows or Check on MCs or Personal Time
• 11:00 pm: Bedtime

Before I left Atlanta, Kate and I were lucky enough to get to spend an entire day together.  At one point during the day, we sat down and established a list of goals to accomplish in 100 days (ending March 4th). Here's my list:

1. Lose 28 lbs (that's 2 lbs a week)
2. Exercise 33 times (in 100 days)
3. Book 14 weekly trivia shows

Yes, I think I lost all my old content, but life has been coming at me too fast to really check to see.