Heaping, Groaning Plates

First things first, many thanks for the suggestions for booking Vegas package deals. Looks like we'll probably go with SouthWest, as they had a pretty cheap deal staying at Treasure Island. Pirates are officially teh shit. Argh, matey, argh...

I perpetually have twelve thousand things on my plate. Usually I like that, like dashing desperately from spinning plate to spinning plate, always on the brink of crashing doom but managing to keep it all going, rotating nicely.

Lately, though, I don't. I just don't. And I think that's directly attributable to the increasing malaise and burnedoutedness with my day job. And, ironically, due to the increasing success of all my sundry spinning plate ventures.

I'm just stuck on the proverbial fence. I keep telling myself that I have to keep plugging away until the sum of the outside income (poker, affiliate marketing, freelance writing gigs, audio porn empire) is consistently > day job income. At that point I can start thinking about making the leap to self-employdom.

Which is great, in theory, and very responsible of me, given the fact that I have a mortgage, student loans, a truck payment, a wife that likes to shop, etc. But it also leaves me perpetually burning the candle at both ends, putting in 60 hour weeks. And, more annoyingly, nothing is ever finished, or done to the extent that it should really be done.

The real crux of the dilemma is that the bulk of my outside endeavors are, by nature, prone to wild fluctuations, as far as income produced. Of late they've vastly exceeded the income from my day job, but that could just as easily swing the other way.

I have a half dozen ideas I'm currently working on, any one of which could potentially produce an income roughly equal to what I make as a cube monkey. Given time contraints, though, none of them get fully fleshed out. Thus none succeed to the point to provide a safe escape from cubeland.

It's not that I can't multi-task. I can. I'm pretty good at it. It's just comes down to an exercise in math. There aren't enough available hours when I work a full-time job. There just aren't.

But I'm also starting to realize there never will be enough hours, if I keep straddling the fence. I'm going to have to jump. And probably sooner rather than later. Absolute worst case scenario is that I fail miserably and have to slink back to cubeland. And there are much worse things than that.