Rarely in my life have I been as tired as I am tonight. It’s a bone deep kind of exhaustion brought on by an excess of work and worry. I’m presently getting exactly as much work as one person can possibly handle, but it’s too late to eliminate worries for June financial deadlines. I have a bill looming in exactly a week and I still have no idea how I’m going to tackle it. Monday is my deadline for transferring PayPal fees and their landing in my bank account in time for Friday, so hopefully a huge miracle will happen this weekend… I think I’ve done my share of hard work in the last two and a half months and have earned a miracle.
I’m therefore wondering how the heck I am managing to be so happily creative and productive these days.
I just landed a new transcription client whom I hope will help me solidify the base for my business. I’m putting a lot of energy into transcription, which I think I will do better with than translation, so I completely rewrote my professional website this week.
I’ve also renewed my interest, and hope, in affiliate marketing by trying out lens making at Squidoo. It’s fun, creative, and has introduced me to a whole new audience.
And somewhere in all of that, in stolen moments of time, I’ve somehow managed to learn how to read all 46 of the basic hiragana kana.
I transcribed from 4PM to midnight yesterday, barely slept a wink, transcribed from 8AM to 5PM today, and then went to deliver fliers for three hours. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go collapse now. 🙂
You’re excused. I’m exhausted just from reading about your day. I don’t remember ever having your energy. But, I also never had your motivation. 🙂
Linda, like I always say, I have no energy. I go through life swimming through molasses. It’s no wonder I’m so shocked about how much I accomplish!
Hi, Rae, There must be something in the air — I just got another transcription job in today, as well — highly unusual on a Saturday. Here’s hoping work continues to fly through the virtual transom for both of us.
Would your new transcription client be willing to front you some money on whatever work you’ve done already for them? Do a direct bank transfer rather than PayPal? It’s always worth asking. I’ll tell you, I’ve been in your shoes so many times. Luckily, my slacker landlord doesn’t care when the rent shows up.
It was an odd market this morning, super slow for everyone in the beginning, time dragged until about 10 — and then all of a sudden everyone was swamped and I didn’t have a minute to do my own shopping, let alone drink my coffee, even though a friend stopped by and stayed to help for an hour. Earrings I’ve made over the past two years were flying off my earring carrousel, with people buying two, three or more pair at a time.
Talk about molasses — I have to stop reading murder mysteries for hours at a time in the middle of the day, stop with the infernal procrastinating (aka re-re-re-rewriting), just burn the jewellery pix to a CD, finish off the CV, get it to the new art gallery and be done with it. When the art gallery director herself stops by and asks me to puh-lease submit it… maybe they really do want my stuff, d’ya think?
Another income stream… I hope.
B
Let’s just say I don’t believe that anyone else is responsible for my budget. 🙂
Good luck with your projects!
Congrats on learning Hirigana, now you can move onto learning the 46 Katakana, then the 1996 Japanese Toyo Kanji. Then you will only have one more official Japanese character set to learn, the 24 Romaji characters; hold on you already know that last set. 🙂
Thev best book I know of, for the Japanese written language is “The Modern Reader’s Japanese=English Character Dictionary” second revised edition ISBN: 0-8048-0408-7
It also includes pre-world war 2 Kanji and more importantly explains stroke order and how to construct characters, bearing in mind that it is a written language traditionally constructed with brushes, not pens.
Hee, I’m nowhere near ready for Katakana yet! I’ve only learned the very basic hirgana. I still have to learn the little marks that change the sounds (eg. ka to ga), basic grammar, etc. I’m only about a quarter of the way through my workbook!
Thanks for the recommendation! I’ll see if I can find it!
My handwriting is terrible so my kana looks kind of sad. 🙁