tara king

I signed up for my free (!) DrupalCon ticket today. It's in New Orleans this year, and will be my fourth DrupalCon. SiteGround gave me a free ticket! Thanks, SiteGround. That was pretty rad.

There I am, innocently filling out the registration form, when I see the question: Do you plan to sprint? Well, yes, obviously. But then I see..."Yes, I am a sprint mentor." And what do I do? I sign up to be a sprint mentor. Why would I do this? I am not a sprint expert! I've only been to three of them!

Hi. You probably got here from #the100dayproject, or from my post about it on Instagram. I feel a bit like I've invited a bunch of people to my house without cleaning up. This blog has been kind of a half-baked thing for a year or more now. I haven't even set up a decent text editor in here. Let us not get started on the looks of the thing, either.

As a new resident of California, I've started my quest to visit every state park. I don't know how many there are, but I'll find out, and then we can know if this is crazy or not. (We already know it's crazy because California is fucking huge.)

I tried to visit every state park in Minnesota and hit up a pretty good number of them before we moved. I meant, always, to write up a review of each park and then...well, here we are with my first state park review.

Tonight the green room is red from a lamp with a red gel scotch taped over the bulb. The floor is painted gold concrete, with a strip of corrugated steel down the middle that bangs when someone steps on it wrong. Two carpets cover most of the floor. In the corner is a big chest that has Leonard Nimoy's name painted on it...presumably from a show he did once. A shitty costume rack with not enough hangers. In the corner is a big hulking mass of electricity--things plugged into stacks of outlets.

Client work: $656.50 (3.75 hours from 4 clients)

It's more accurate to say 3.75 hours for $217.50. I did most of the work in February. I also exchanged a lot of these hours ($400+) for a laptop. Hooray bartering!

Office job: $1773.59

Contracting job: $825

April's goal was $900, combined client/contract/freelance. I win!

Expenses: $79 (client theme-recouped, and book of illustrations)
Equipment: $520 (laptop, mouse, keyboard cover)
Travel: $450 (ticket to DrupalCon)
Marketing: $0

March 2014 Income Report

Because I praise financial transparency in others, because it forces me to be upfront about what I'm doing, because it seems interesting, I've decided to post monthly income reports. I have a convoluted set of work relationships, including choreography, a day job, and freelancing; I'll try to lay it out here.

Client work:
7.09 hours: $806.50
from 5 clients

It was January 5, 2014. That morning, I got up earlier than I'd like. I didn't shower. I slouched around feeling terrible about all of my jobs and all of my future, and then I snapped at my mom for offering me sweats to wear to the tai chi class my sister had invited me to.

A week before the Superbowl I had delusions that I would do my daily writing practice that day. All other bets were off, no plans for daily exercise or flossing or anything I normally feel bad about skipping, but I wanted to still write. How grand it would be to get fresh notes on this high holy day, to notice and capture all that happens on a frenzied, rare Superbowl Sunday. No matter what happened, I though, I would write an essay on my history as a Broncos fan, or my family, or...something along those lines. On this elusively important thing in my life called football.

It was the summer of 1997 when I learned the very basics of hand lettering and graphic design. I got a break on tuition at a fancy summer school, so I got to hang out with a bunch of rich kids doing pottery and photography instead of remedial math. It totally made up for the fact that I never went to Summer Camp. I signed up for Commercial Art. Our teacher refused to acknowledge desktop publishing software and insisted we learn to hand letter. At the time it seemed nutty, but I loved handlettering.

This has been a long time coming. A train far away, a seed in the earth, a storm building...there are a bunch of metaphors I could use but let's just say: This isn't some flash in the brainpan.

I once kept an online diary. I was 16. It was semi-anonymous because this was the mid-90s and Google hadn't yet formed the internet in its own image.