December 31, 2007
Wow! I had no idea how much work it really takes to start up a small business! Since I’ve decided to “go pro,” I figured that I need to do things the right way because I so hate dealing with hassle or feeling like I did not do something correctly.
I bought a book last week, The Small Business Start-Up Kit for California and have found it quite informative and a bit overwhelming. There’s quite a bit of paperwork to complete i.e. registering a business name aka a fictitious business name. The fictitious part makes me laugh. As an English teacher, fiction always means “not real” to me and it makes me feel like my business name is just a figment of my imagination. But paying the money to register the name and then fulfilling the requirements of publishing it in a newspaper sure made it all too real as I was handing over the $95 dollars. At least I can now claim that on my tax deductions.
I’m still working on editing my photographs and have been uploading photos onto my website. I’m focusing on my landscapes at the moment and already have several galleries uploaded.
The clock reads 8:43 pm, and soon it will be 2008! Why is it that as we get older, time seems to speed up. I’ve stopped making new year’s resolution as I think they’re destined for failure. We should make resolutions to change ourselves as needed, not to simply mark the beginning of new year or to fulfill some tradition that seems to have become simply an excuse for people to party and get wild and drunk. Anyways, getting off m soapbox here.
I really looking forward to 2008. The twins will be talking a lot more this year and I can’t wait. But then again, check in with me later when they won’t stop talking and asking me questions 
. The twins are talking, just not in complete English sentences. I write “English sentences” because they are speaking in their own special twin language — to each other and to the rest of the family. I often laugh when I’m in the middle of a conversation with one of the twins and have to tell them “Sweetie, please speak in English because Auntie Zoe does not understand Twin-ese.”
2008 is also the official start of my photography business. It still feels a bit weird to say the “business” part, but that is what it is. And I have so much to learn! But as long as I’m enjoying this, it’s all worth it.
2008 is also the 12th year that I have been teaching. At times, it seem only yesterday that I first walked onto the campus of Colton Middle School, keys of the classroom in hand, and thinking that I was going to get paid doing something that I loved to do. But here I am, contemplating the passage of 12 years in a career that I still enjoy. There’s a tree outside my classroom that was planted during my second year at CMS. It serves as a tangible reminder of the passage of my time at CMS. When it was fist planted, the tree was just a bit taller than me. Now the tree is probably four times my height. Too bad it grew instead of me .
I don’t know what else 2008 will bring, but I am looking forward to this new year. My health is much better than it has been in the last five years, now that I know what I’m dealing with. Controlling my diabetes is a constant thing, but at least now I know what it was that was causing most of my chronic fatigue. I still need to be careful and not push myself because the chronic fatigue could set in and send me into a relapse and I so don’t want that to happen.
The summer of 2007 saw me return to the gym and commence working out daily. I’ve been fairly consistent with working out 5-6 times a week for about an hour each day. The only setback has been the last two weeks due to me re-injuring my right ankle. I was walking across my sister’s kitchen floor when all of a sudden, I was on the floor due to my ankle collapsing on me. I’ve had to wear an ankle brace since then to help my walk and not twist my ankle again.
Damn that bear in Yosemite! It’s his fault that I have a weak ankle! One of these days, I need to write up that story known in my family as the “Bear Incident.” And no, I wasn’t mauled by the bear…but I’m getting ahead of myself here. I’ll save the story for a later time. I have to be in the right frame of mind to tell that story.
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