"Find a place to make a stand, and take it easy" Eagles

I’m writing this as part of the compensatory strategies I now try to use in an effort to better manage and direct myself with this minor brain damage.  Writing out what I am thinking is one of the more difficult things I have to do these days, along with remembering things, rational decision making, and being really irritable at times. 

I have good ideas about my future and trying to mesh these with what I wanted to accomplish by sacrificing a few years in the service has been difficult.  Nothing so far has gone according to plan.  First falling under stop loss and then spending over a year in the medical retirement system has put me far behind schedule on everything.  It also gave me time to get seriously disappointed watching these timelines I set for myself come and go on the word of the Army on when I would be done and out.  But alas here I am on the first official day of my retirement from the Army.

So here’s the skinny of the plan.  We’re moving back to Indy, but we’ll be living down south.  The Old Man is going to cut me out some property off his place where in a couple years I should be wrapping up building our home, a home that I won’t owe anyone for.  Most of the building materials will be from the land itself.  Being heavily wooded I will be getting all the wood and stone for the structure from the property.  Everything else I’ll sort out on the way. 

Along with having a home debt free, I will also be doing some minor farming, and raising livestock to feed the family.  These of course have several benefits, besides saving money, I will know exactly where our food is coming from and won’t have to be concerned with GMOs and the multitude of crap that’s in the meat coming from most major grocery chains. 

Work?  Well I don’t think I’ll really ever be working for someone ever again.  I have four years of education benefits to use, with a small stipend to help with living expenses to boot.  Then I’ll have my pension, which at the moment is about 50% of what my income was.  I have some other business ventures worked out on the side, but the bottom line is, I am interested in maintaining an income that will provide the sort of life we want and need. I'm not interested in working my ass off to make someone else rich.

Then on top of all of this I’ll get to raise my son in an environment that I believe he will learn the most from.   Not only will he be in a good school system out of the city school system, but he learn a lot of the things I did growing up.  He’ll learn about self-sufficiency, responsibility, in an environment he can’t bullshit, nature.

That was the quick and dirty, and as things progress I’ll write about how my plans are going and future plans.  I welcome any comments from friends.  I think the key to being successful in my life and future is just to always be mindful in what I’m doing. "We may win, and we may lose, but we'll never be here again." Eagles

In the Beginning...or middle

The purpose of me writing this is to evaluate my existence to this point in my life, and examine, develop and execute the dreams and goals that I have imagined and set for myself and inherently my family. Goals that allow me to live life on my terms, in line with the values, morals, and political ideas that have evolved through my perception of life, and it’s purpose. A life that I can call quality, maybe even transforming my life philosophy into an ethos that I can personally quantify as excellence in living. That is a bold statement. Who are you to think that you can achieve what it is that theologians and philosophers have argued over for centuries? True, but regardless I must, in order to achieve peace within myself and maybe just maybe, by making strides in this direction, I’ll change the world. Again, who are you to suggest that thousands of generations of human evolution, through the nature and perspective of man, has ended up wrong?