Day’s Verse:
God doesn’t want us to be shy with his gifts, but bold and loving and sensible.
2 Timothy 1:7

For some time Ian’s been eyeing these amazing $5,000+ monitor setups that have vast screen acreage in amazing configurations. Eventually he realized that he could achieve the setup he craved at a much lower cost by assembling it himself in parts. I readily agreed because, let’s be honest, Ian’s spent next to nothing on his hobbies while willingly facilitating my spending thousands of dollars on my hobbies. Besides, he’s had the same monitor since 2001 — it’s practically an antique, and he even repaired it once himself — and his video card is 6 years old, too. As a reward for surviving ITP Phase 2 (his most recent work project, which was rocky to say the least), he finally ordered a new monitor and video card for himself, the first step in his Grand Monitor Plan.

Here Ian is with the new monitor, video card, and an extremely rare huge smile on his face. (Sorry it’s grainy; ISO 400 will do that.)
Ian and his computer parts
I doubt you can read it, but the monitor has a note on it that says “Thank you for selecting this monitor.” I think it’s missing a few words, and it should actually say “Thank you for selecting this HUMONGOUS, AMAZING monitor OF DOOM.” Just a thought. It’s 6:25 pm; I might as well write off dragging the boy away from his machine until the new hardware is installed and working. I’ve got my appreciative, admiring comments all shined, buffed, and ready for deployment.

More serious, depressing news under the fold. In other news, I briefly talked with the ED at the Bike Alliance about the future. Namely, there’s no more teaching work for me with the Bike Alliance until late summer or early fall. The grant is done after that. It’s probably already late for me to be thinking about how to spend my time long-term. In short: What do I do with myself? This will probably be a recurring theme on my blog for a while as I struggle with my future. Since 2009, life has taken a lot of twists and turns I didn’t expect, and I’ve done a lot of things that took more guts than I thought I had. This may be another of those moments. The safe thing is to find a tech writing job in Corporate America. The scary thing would be to start my own business teaching bike classes. I will need some real courage to step out and start teaching my own bike classes… but I really feel drawn towards that. Each Bike Alliance class I’ve taught has reinforced that I’m a talented teacher, that I love it, and it’s what I’m passionate about. Fear is holding me back. I’ve mastered fear before. It’s hard. I’m scared. Part of what makes us human is not giving in to our fear, but instead overcoming it and subjecting it to our wills. I refuse to let fear rule my decisions, now or ever.

2 thoughts on “Monitor, Video Card, Smiles

  1. While reading this post I was thinking about that Spanish quote from “Strictly Ballroom” and then saw that you quoted it yourself in the older post you linked to! Funny!

    It doesn’t seem likely that you’d be thrilled working in corporate America again. You have the credentials and quite a bit of experience for teaching classes via your own business, so that seems like the way to go. Take it one step at a time and the fear will diminish.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.