Austin Light

My January goal update is a little late because I was in Virginia visiting my younger bro, Cole, and his wife, Tori. Cole is a watercraft engineer in the Army and he’s getting ready to leave for Haiti for six to nine months, so we thought it would be good to hang out with them for New Year’s. On Saturday Cole took us on his boat, a LCU (or some acronym like that). He showed us his bunk, the engine room where he works, the ridiculous wall of switches and gauges he monitors, and a bunch of other cool things, like “the tunnel,” a long hallway type section where they store supplies like gigantic oil filters.

I brought my spare 20 inch monitor with me because Cole wanted to borrow it while he was away. He showed me the space in his bunk where he planned to mount it and his Xbox so he could play during his downtime. He put off mounting it while I was there so he could set up his Xbox in the other room and play some Codmow2 online with me.

We were playing a special ops match Saturday morning and he picked up a gun and said, “Dude, turn around and look at my guy.” I did, and asked him what was so special about it.

“I shot this gun last week, in real life,” he said.

Whoa.

It was part of some routine training I think. They had machine guns with grenade launchers attached (I want to say it was an M16, but who knows) and they had to shoot down targets that would pop up at the range, similar to what you have to do in the first level of Call of Duty. Cole said he normally gets pretty good rankings, but when they added the grenade launcher he had to hold the gun differently and he didn’t score as well as he would have liked. Maybe it’s because he’s my little brother, but I found that little exchange to be both awesome, and slightly unsettling.

Overall, it was quite a humbling trip. I’m proud of my little brother (okay, so he’s only a year younger than me). I might be able to work from home now (more on that in a bit), but his office blows mine away. And yes I can string a few words together in a pretty sentence, but he knows how to fix an engine on a huge military vessel. Impressive.

Anyways, on to the January goals. Let’s review December first.

-Get a job |Hired on Dec. 29, and I start tomorrow!|
-Finish some artwork for some friends and family |Yep, now I just have to send it|
-Have faith in God, not in myself |I think I did pretty good, really tried to not worry|
-Get the Thunderbird registered in NC |Ran into some complications with the paperwork. Apparently Brooke’s grandma’s will, death certificate, and car title are not enough. We needed one more random piece of paper to make it officially ours. We really have to get this done because I got in a wreck on the 29th. I was halfway through an intersection and this 16-year-old girl runs a red light. I swerved and missed hitting her car door, which could have killed her, but still smashed into her front left tire. She got out sobbing, and with something spilled all over her, but she was fine. Our cars weren’t though. Don’t know about her, but mine was totaled. Her insurance people were slow over the holidays, but they called me just the other day to let me know my check would be on the way soon. They actually gave me a pretty decent amount for my car.
-Go to the dentist |Nope|
-Get new glasses |No, but I picked some out|
-Don’t be a scrooge! Ignore those introverted tendencies during holiday fellowship times |Yep, had a blast at Brooke’s Christmas party, her office had craps and black jack tables where we gambled for chips that could exchange for tickets to win prizes, also, free alcohol.|
-Keep on training for that half marathon |Mostly|

So here are my January goals:

-Stick to my new half marathon training schedule
-Show my new employers that hiring me was a great decision
-Register the Thunderbird
-Finish at least two of the books I got for Christmas (I got a lot!)
-Do something awesome for Brooke when she’s not expecting it
-Get my home office organized

Since everyone likes to come up with yearly goals in January, I thought I’d do a couple of those too:

-Finish my novel
-Run three half marathons, and PR on them all
-Grow my company’s brand, which will in turn grow our paychecks, haha
-Save for our trip to Italy in May so that Brooke and I can have an excellent five year anniversary, and we can have a blast hanging out with my parents
-Reach my savings account goals

All right, that’s all the goals taken care. So the new job, it’s going to be quite an adventure. I’m the VP of Marketing for SPAN Enterprises, a web software development company based in Rock Hill, SC, just 20 mins from Charlotte. The company is relatively new, there’s a small team of talented programmers in India that have been working hard the past year or so to get our new products ready for 2010, and then there’s me, the founders, and a few other folks here. I was brought on to take these products and make them known. Because we’re so small, I’ll be wearing multiple hats. One day I might be designing and writing some press materials and conducting interviews, and another day I could be taking calls from customers and interacting with clients online via, Twitter, Facebook, or our website. This job is perfect for me. I’ll get to do things I’m good at, I’ll have tons of variety to keep me on my toes, and I’m sure I’ll learn a ton.

I took a bit of a pay cut to come here, but as studies on my generation have shown, we’re willing to do that if it means we’ll move to a better work environment. Since I’ll get to do much of my work from home, I’d say that’s a pretty good environment. Anything is better than back at the newspaper. Now that I don’t work there I could write pages and pages about how terribly run that place is and how the company culture in the Charlotte office is a breeding ground for hostility and cynicism, but I’d rather not. I learned a lot of great lessons there, and I’m ready to move on (in case you haven’t picked up on it by now, I’m kind of a learning junkie. I know that’s weird, but I enjoy feeding my brain).

Another perk to my new job is the growth potential. We’re poised to be quite successful, our product is excellent (I’ll share that with you later…that’s kind of my job), I just have to make sure people know about it and can get to it.

So December was a great month overall, but I’m really looking forward to what January, and 2010 has in store for me. What about you?

Oh yeah, here’s a fun fact, while driving home we were listening to Ryan Seacrest count down the top songs of the decade and Brooke and I realized we were together for all of them. We started dating November 20, 2000, I was 16, she was 15, been together ever since. Kind of cool.