Progress Report - 30 days

Guess you're due for a progress report. According to my notes, I've been doing this for exactly 30 days. You've seen some of the ups and downs (mostly downs) through this and the Go Thunk Yourself, Smore! blog.

While I'm not going to go into the details of the specific visions I've set for myself (they are pretty big), I will say that one involved winning the lottery. What has happened in this that that my winnings way more than doubled. Out of 6 weeks, I've won three times, Ok, these were $4-7 pots, but before this, I did months at a stretch and only once one a $2 pot. So statistically, I'm raking in the dough. That is statistically impossible to achieve - even on this small scale. Just have to keep this one going.

In my relationships, I've gotten some very valuable gains. In the family, we are getting along better than ever. All of us in this house are being even more supportive than before. I've been able to get my temper down to basically no outbursts at all, despite the stresses of trying to repair all types of various run-down farm equipment and buildings while also battling the weather and keeping all the livestock and crops handled. Since I was raised on the idea that the occasional temper outburst was acceptable, this is a noticed improvement. (Main point behind this is to simply get the negatives out of my life, such as only listening to positive shows on TV and cutting down on the news and TV in general.)

My health has taken some interesting turns. As I mentioned, I had some down attitudes in this, followed by some serious physical illness. That cough was the nearest I want to get to pneumonia - the worst hacking cough I have ever had. I've woken myself up at night with coughing before, but never worried about being able to breathe while I slept... I realized I had gotten off the rails and then went back on the schedule. The cough has been gone for about a week, and my earlier allergy-like symptoms have all but disappeared - where normally I would have these all winter. The inflamed eyelid is back to normal. The knee is getting more attention, since I've never had "bad knees" before and no real reason to have any now (other than this note from "The Secret" DVD). Just need to be more loving and more grateful. So I'm working at it. The interesting point is that I'm saying now that all pain and discomfort that I'm currently experiencing is to just realize that I'm healing and reverting old mis-healed injuries. As well, I got the exercise bike out and have worked out how to use this every morning to start getting my weight back down to where I like it.

The room clean up has made some progress, but I'll be continuing this each week for some time. I already have taken out some three or four full garbage-cans-worth of stuff. There's a lot more to go. What I have done is to make room for my own framed art. This puts more aesthetics around me and reinforces the art vision I have for myself. I've started getting some artwork online, through deviantArt, which has currently the number 4 position on Google under "Art". I found a stack of artwork I'd done earlier and started the process of scanning them all in. They need to be colorized and prepped, made web-ready. Meanwhile, I got some more books on cartooning - which are showing me more of the professional end of this. (I'll start blogging more of this separately.) But I'd been having trouble getting going on this art work, which is a vital path for me to follow.

My books are on their own way. I signed a contract with a publisher in Australia to publish one of my books. Meanwhile, one of the books above showed me how I can get my own syndication and promotion going.

There are still a lot more things to happen for me, a lot of dreams to happen. But I'm quite happy with the results so far. These results show that I can indeed change my own current world and improve it. Even really bad negative health effects can be overcome.

The real trick is internalizing positive thinking - and making a life which is full of endless possiblities.