Ah, another small post so soon?

Well, a few things to update on. I applied for City Council - if a vacancy appears between elections cycles, they just hold interviews like any other job. This will be the second time this year, actually. I didn't even make it to the interview round last time but I applied again anyway. We'll see what happens with that.

In the meantime, I'm trying to think of creative ways to make $500. I have way more than $500 in the bank, I just don't want to dig into it if I don't have to. So I've been looking to side gigs - just little things, like data entry - to bump up my cash reserves, along with looking around the house to see if I can sell anything on eBay.

Once I get this whole business thing started, I'll see some extra money come in. Maybe not as much as I'd like at first - I'm not expecting a smash-hit success straight out the gate - but if it's anything I can put that toward goal-specific savings. One such goal is my interior designer certification. There is a community college not far from here that offers a 6-month interior design program that ends with sitting for the certification exam with the state. Not only would this give me the opportunity to start another business doing something I would enjoy, and not only would it give me some additional skills that I want to have, but it actually leads into a further goal: getting my architecture license.

Turns out, my state doesn't require a degree to sit for the license exam, but it does require 6 years of "doing architecture things." Academia and work experience both count. I went to city-planning school where my focus was urban design, which I can easily argue counts as two years off that number. Another six months of interior design college and that leaves me with 3.5 years of professional experience to account for, which I can absolutely get with my own interior design business.

Do I want to be an architect, career-wise? I dunno. But I do know there are structures I want to design and build, and if I want to design and build something, than I damn well want to design and build something! If this is what I need to get all that legally passed then that's what I'm gonna do.

This questline mainly falls under "If Carefree has to make money to survive, then Carefree wants to make money on their own priorities and schedule, not someone else's." I've got other questlines too, but if I'm real about it, almost all of them fall under some combination of engineering, spatial planning, policy, and government. My initial business plan (which I've been tight-lipped about, I know) is an excellent community-building effort that will greatly benefit the community and at the same time get me a lot of connections, which could help my political aspirations.

I've already set up a seed resource for my community, and it's been absolutely popping off this year. It's only April and we have nearly as many new patrons as all of last year. My intention is to make it a focal point of the local food production ecosystem for the city, taking advantage of the sheer number of gardeners in our area. So far we haven't had much luck when it comes to patron donations, except for one or two extremely prolific seed-savers. But that's fine, it's become obvious that some form of seed-saving education is necessary to make this really work, so that's on the docket.

I really want to start installing solar panels, small wind turbines, rain barrels (wood and steel, not plastic), greenhouses, and other such things around the city. That requires engineering at minimum, some level of capital to acquire the materials (or great luck scavenging), and possibly communication with the city about ordinances and permits. Solar coolers and solar icemakers for the summer are on the list, too.

There's a sort of snowball effect to this, where the more well-known I become, the more connections I make, and the more projects I complete successfully, the more likely my future projects are to gain traction. This implies, logically, that I should try my hand at a bunch of stuff to see what all sticks, but part of my reasoning for doing anything of this is that I get so burnt out on working too much that I need something a little more lowkey. I know, I know, talking about wanting more time and less work in the same post as talking about starting multiple businesses may be a symptom somewhere in the DSM. But I see the vision. I have a lot of faith in all this panning out, even in ways I'm not expecting.