Middle of the Night

It's 2:48 a.m. I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and can't calm myself down enough to go back to sleep. It's been a long, long time since I've "blogged". I've got a lot going on these days with work and two kids. I know it's no excuse but let's face it, this blog is unlikely to make me rich and famous, or even pay the mortgage so it falls pretty low on the priority list. But there's not a whole lot else a person can do at 2:48 a.m., so here goes...

I've been reading this book about becoming self-employed. It's peppered with all kinds of stories of people who have turned some kind of skill or service into a viable business. I find the idea of self employment very attractive. I've been working through some ideas in my head but none of them have really given me that feeling that it could work. I think the key is to find a product (preferably an online product) that bridges one thing that people already use, with another. There is a guy in the book that I'm reading that wrote a tutorial for an application that he used a lot. Turns out, there was a huge need in the market for that because the company that put out the app never did anything more than write basic instructions. Now, this guys just sells this resource online as a living. And, there's another story about someone who wrote an online application that allows music teacher to track and bill their clients. He cleverly sells an annual subscription to the service - but only to people who have over a certain amount of clients. Anyone under that can access it for free. Once they are reliant on it, and presumably making money from their services, he charges them. Brilliant. That's the beautiful thing about the age that we live in. You don't have to take your wagon down to the market to sell your goods anymore. Anyone with a computer, around the entire world has a market place in their house, 24 hours a day.

We are going to the Rockies game tomorrow and taking those sweet boys. I hope the weather gods smile on us. We're also stopping by a birthday party for a dear friend of my husband. The party was originally supposed to be a camping trip on his land near Ft. Collins. Land that is likely charred and burned now because of the High Park fire. I'm astounded by how many people have been evacuated and possibly have lost their homes in Colorado this summer. Damn you climate change! June is not supposed to be 100 degrees every day. Rain is supposed to fall every once and while.

It turns out that I'm not funny or creative in the middle of the night so I'm going to go try to sleep again. Sweet dreams everybody!