State of the Jonathan Address

Last Friday I worked the State of the City Address presented by Mayor Maryann Edwards at Pechanga Resort and Casino.  One thing happens every year without fail...I get corrected on my Pechanga pronouniation.  Like I said on my twitter, you cant pronounce it like Topanga, you have to say it as if your were a snobby old bag from Britain.

Schools been going well.  Im taking 2 classes this semester at CSUSM and I have abour 4 classes to remaining to get my BA in Communication.  Its taken so long because 1) I'm lazy when it comes to school and 2) I've been workin my career job for the past 4 years and its difficult to work full time and go to school.  Hats off to the "moms" out there that do it, its super tough.  So far I aced both my midterms and aced my first term paper with two to go.  I've never done really well in school because I am not as passionate about it as I am my work.  I love creating websites, graphic design, photography, and video.  I'm glad I have a career that utilizes all my passions.

Work has been going well...with exceptions.  The economic situation our country is in due to subprime lending has really affected us at work.  I work for the City of Temecula where half of our general fund is sales tax, and as you all can guess, sales across the country have been hit really hard.  In December, the city laid off all our project employees.  Project employees were full time, hard working people that because they were defined as "project" they didnt get benifits or were represented by our union.  We lost 5 people from our department, 2 were crucial losses as they were our helpdesk.  Helpdesk is who everyone calls when thier computer/software/phone stops working.  We had two people working this job fulltime and lost them.  So January was real tough on us.  I had to cover part of that helpdesk job as well as my own full time job.  I'm not complaining, we all must work together though this, but this extra job has been taxing on my stress levels and energy.  Last March we also lost another employee/position due to the early retirements.  This landed me another job to do, the AV Room and AV related work.  This job, unlike the helpdesk, I'm excited about taking over.  AV is one of my passions.  Plus we are building a new Civic Center in Old Town Temecula and I will be an integral part in designing the new council chamber's AV Room and Community Rooms.  The overall story is works been super busy, super stressful, with no end in sight.  Thats whats been consuming most of my life.

Ever since reading listening to Timothy Ferris's book "4 Hour Workweek," I've gotten excited about expanding my side project of movie theater websites.  Currently I do the websites for 3 movie theaters.  Ive been working on weekends re-programming the back end getting ready for a new and improved version of the site that can scale to many more theaters.  What this means is that its my hope some day to have the income of 50 or so movie theater websites and afford to travel and spend lots of time abroad emersing myself in thier culture and learning other languages.  This project could also open the possibilities of me being a stay-at-home dad if I ever get married and have kids.  The beauty of the movie theater website project is that I can work from anywhere that has an internet connection.  Although lately I've been lazy at progressing this project as works been real taxing on my energy where I spend most of my off hours playing Halo with Luke, Aaron, and Oscar.

In my spare time I've been re-listening to the Harry Potter books which I forgot how amazing they are, they definately deserve a future post to this blog.  The movies are still amazing for the special effects and abridged version of the story but nothing beats the books.  The books really go into detail the relationships people had with Harry's father and those get overlooked in the movie, and I think discovering those relationships are real important to Harry.

If you're reading this last paragraph I will be amazed.  If I looked at a blog post this long I may not have read it, hahahaha.  Well thats my life in a nutshell, a friggin huge nutshell but you get the point.