Year 2010 Part B

Bel always wants to feel reassured that we have a plan forward in our lives. I used to love planning back when I worked with big-pharma, after all at one time during my employment I was a project manager. However, in the last few years I have had such a difficult time making any plan stick, that I’ve almost lost my faith on planning and rather have relied on the trusted “wait and see” approach.

At the end of 2009 Bel was getting tired of my haphazard approach and put some pressure on me to come up with a plan for the next year.

January 1^st came and went and nothing. I begged for an extension and promised to have something concrete by this year’s Chinese New Year. To be honest, even by February 14^th (this year’s Chinese New Year day), I had nothing. But of course I had to pretend that things were becoming clearer and that the “plan” was coming into view. My prediction for 2010: Lots of change.

If I knew then what I know now, I would have been more forceful about my predictions, but suffice it to say that I was right on target with my prediction. For one, in March I started to focus on real estate investments and later on our identification and eventual move to our new home.

Are there any more changes expected for the last quarter of 2010? Other than settling in our new place and getting familiar with our new neighborhood, nothing is firmly on the books, but if it’s like the first half of the year, I’d better embrace myself.

One event that will certainly affect the last 2 months of the year is the expectation that Erick, our youngest son who has lived in Cusco, Peru for almost 5 years, is coming home for a few weeks as he prepares for a new phase of his life. Erick has become quite interested in writing about his experiences in Peru and thus we will be putting a lot of energies into identifying ways to publish his work in some fashion. His visit coincides with the annual Miami International Book Fair on the streets of downtown Miami. We’re hoping to get contacts and ideas at the fair. We are also hoping to be introduced to the new world of publishing which is evolving from the cellulose-based format to the electronic format of eReaders and eTablets. Writing for a living is not a smooth road but as other writers have told me, if you have it in you that you must write, write you must to be able to live with yourself. I’m hoping that the information we acquire during the book fair is more positive than negative and that Erick is encouraged to keep writing into his life plans.