Thoughts and reflections from the past week or so from my own financial independence campaign.
Progress on my goals
Temporarily back on land
Our big shock last week (and carrying on this week) is that our dog needed an emergency spleen removal. He actually seems OK about it, all things considered, but now he’s on forced strict rest and climbing on-and-off the boat wasn’t an option for him.
Every time I leave the boat to go into a building I’m reminded how much better living on the boat is. I guess I just prefer the minor discomfort of boat life to the convenience of conventional living now?
Whatever. Our dog needs a place to recover and I’m grateful we were able to stay with family while he recuperates.
Start-up work
I’ve had to rewrite this twice because it’s been a fast weekend.
We’ve had an investor come in for 15% of the second business venture. This is the one I’m most excited about, and we were going to give it a go in 12-18 months if we could save the pennies but the investor coming in now means we’re not bootstrapping it, which means we can act faster.
Today I’ve had to learn about encryption and post-quantum security, so I can’t say I’m not learning new things!
This second business is going to need a regulatory licence, so I’m putting together an application for that. We’re also in the final stages of landing 3 x fairly substantial clients for the original consultancy start-up, so that’s cool.
I’m working most hours now but the ride is fun and it’s great to be a team all pushing the same way.
Distractions and detours
Writing club
So I haven’t made much progress in paid writing – my bad – but I did go to writing club with a historical romance chapter excerpt that I’d written. The gang seemed to enjoy it.
Non-FIRE goals
My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)
I missed guitar this week because my dog had just been returned to us and needed help with getting outside to go to the toilet. Understandably, as the various drugs were in his system, his body wasn’t playing entirely to his rules and it took both me and Lady SierraWhiskyMike to move him.
However he’s made a massive recovery over the weekend so I’m pretty hopeful the surgery worked. If anything he’s more energetic now, so maybe the spleen thing was making him sick and none of us had noticed it?
So this week I’ve maybe faffed about a bit with Limelight but not really learned anything or progressed.
Fitness
I went to CrossFit this week and have bought a 10-session punchcard so I can get a few classes in without committing to a long-term membership.
A small gym has moved (they say temporarily) into a space opposite the co-working space I use and they offer classes throughout the day. Lady SierraWhiskyMike had been to their classes before and gotten on with the trainer, and I figure that the lack of timing commitment on my side coupled with the convenience of the location would mean that I could go.
Back in my military days, CrossFit was just a new way of doing circuit training, i.e. a cheap way of getting a lot of troops to incorporate heavy lifts and add muscle rather than just endurance.
There’s a scale issue with training 100+ people at a time, and that usually means that every PT session was cardio or muscular endurance; adding CrossFit techniques inspired the PEd Staff to get us to grow muscles too.
Obviously it then became a bit… weird… and the military largely dropped the brand but kept the original concept.
Anyway, suffice to say it has been a while since I last did this and reconditioning sucks every time, so I didn’t perform amazingly well. Not shamefully badly, but no medals or records were at risk that day.
I’ll keep this up for the 10 x punchcard sessions because the classes are so frequent that it’s convenient for me. People are nice, gym is a bit small, but I don’t have to think too much about training. I’m then getting one calisthenics session on top of that, and trying to get more walking in.
Final thoughts
Startup dreams are going pretty damned well. I wish I could write more on this blog without breaching confidentiality agreements because some of the things that have happened already have been mental.
Anyway, sorry this is late. I had to rewrite it as things were so intensely in motion over the weekend so I delayed what would have been a depressing update for a more optimistic one after we pulled our angel investment raise out of the bag. Seems positive!
My financial independence campaign continues!
