My Last Week at MBI

Well, I’m done with my office job. My computer system is now my own. No PC!!! I’ll be working on my Macintosh! I hate PCs! I love my Mac. 'Nuff said.
It would have been much easier to leave if I had a lousy job filling out TPS reports or some such nonsense, but I’ve spent 12 years being involved with something I enjoy--making books. Yes, there is corporate B.S., but that’s to be found at every company. So I'll miss the buzz of puttiing together a good book, the strategizing over look and feel, but I've done enough of that for one lifetime and I'll be doing my favorite part of that--making the words and the photos--so that I can let go of easily enough. Mostly I'll miss the interaction--the tired old jokes with Dennis and Josh, hearing Darwin rant, Jim's addled babble, and so on. So leaving was not necessarily easy, and it took me a while to (as a friend of mine said) “Go over the wall.”
I had a great last week, being treated to lunches, flying a blimp in the building, saying goodbye to everyone, and drinking beer in the office. As I told the CEO, if the job was all beer drinking and blimp flying, I’d never quit.
Good fun, but now it's time to live my dream of becoming an independent contractor. At the moment, I have two Macs up and running (my desktop and my laptop), Science Friday on MPR on the radio, a warm cup of coffee to drink, some home-baked cookies to snack on, shoots of tractors and garages to schedule, and a proposal to send off. Nothin' wrong with that.

The Naked Scot Rides!

Camera Geek Bidding

My final missing piece of equipment is a higher-resolution digital camera. I’ve been shooting with a 10D for nearly three years now. Tho I initially didn’t like using digital—the saturation of the images wasn’t up to what I was used to from Fuji film—I’ve come to really appreciate the advantages. In fact, I now prefer digital.

For shooting calendars and opening spreads in a larger-format book, the 10D’s 6-megapixel images are not up to the task, plus my 10D is starting to show signs of age (missing autofocus shots, and misfiring when used with my 70-200), so it’s time for an upgrade. I wanted a full-frame camera, so I had the Canon 1DS Mark 1 and the Canon 5D to choose from. I went over the specs at length. The 5D has more options when it comes to color adjustment, can be set to ISO 3200, and has a larger LCD. Plus it uses the same battery as my 10D, which means I would have two chargers and some extra batteries right away. But it doesn’t have the heavy-duty environmental seals of the 1DS. And I simply love the way the Canon D bodies feel in your hand.

So I’m bidding on eBay on bodies. It’s become a bit of an obsession with me. I missed what I thought was a perfect one last night. It was here in the Twin Cities area, in perfect condition, and came with a transferable extended warranty. I bid a bit higher than I thought was necessary, and some guy from Indonesia outbid me!

Ah well, I’ve found another one and used the “Buy It Now" feature. The hunt is fun, but I'm ready to get the equipment here and put it to work!

The Rock Dam Ride

I spent some time visiting with an ATV club in Wisconsin on Saturday. A great group of people. They are doing a lot of good things for their community, and were a nice bunch.

I posted my favorite photo from the ride. I shot it over a woman's shoulder as she rode down the trail.

A couple of notes came up. First, I need to use my tape recorder more often. I have trouble getting quotes down in notes, especially in these situations where time is tight and lots of different people are talking to me at once.

I also think that having an assistant would be a huge help. I’d like someone to take some shots while I’m interviewing people, and get additional names and quotes from people in the club.

The Price of Time

Two weeks showed up in the mail on Friday, a check from one of my magazine clients. The fact that the check was long overdue was besides the point—money these days is time.

I know about what I need to survive each month, and each check represents a little piece of time. Enough pieces of time, and I can take some time off to relax. I don’t imagine that will be happening for a while, honestly.

So I keep a spreadsheet with assignments, and I have enough assignments to survive about six months. Not necessarily thrive, but it’s all about survival right now. And those little assignments of time mean I’ll be doing this for six months. That’s good.

I’ve been reading Mike Perry’s Handbook to Freelance Writing, and a passage of Mike’s that stuck with me states that he’s always six months away from a desk job. I guess he sees money as freedom as well as time.

Freedom. That concept is just starting to sink in, possibly beginning last week when I realized that I had enough work in the hopper to feel like this may actually work.

The CEO at MBI was concerned about the long lead time between the time I made this decision and the time I left. I wanted time to get some contracts signed and preparations made, and my boss wanted me to sort out some of my projects before I left, so we managed to convince the CEO to be patient.

While the time has been good in terms of getting some things lined up, the wait has been hard. There’s nothing worse than knowing something hard is coming that you don’t quite know how to deal with, and not having much time to do anything about it.

So it has been a long fall, with too much time to worry and too little to work.

Happily, however, the wait is nearly over, and I find my mind turning to finding a market for a Kodiak Island ride and weighing whether it is worth writing a sample chapter on spec rather than comparing health insurance plans and figuring out how to manage 401K plans. A welcome change.

I’m looking forward to the day when marketing concerns turn to crafting phrases and choosing f-stops.