Timothy Yordy

My very first online video The Japanese Beetle Trap has surpassed 5,000 views on YouTube. I know that there are plenty of videos that get views into the millions but I’ll settle for 5,000 and counting for a low quality video about japanese beetles, it’s definitely a niche topic.

My two other more recent videos appear to have gotten lost somewhere in the bowels of YouTube however. A Valentine Song from back in February still has less than 20 views and Josh the Chicken only has 10 views. I don’t do enough in the field of online video to understand why one video gets lots of views and others never receive any. One thing I have noticed is that YouTube now pushes paying them to promote your video on their site. So that could explain why more recent videos seem to get lost if there’s nothing external to YouTube driving a lot traffic to the video. 

You can view all of my videos on the Videos page.

I’ve posted a detailed description of the construction of our chicken coop. Also we’ve got six more chicks now. For details on both please visit this post: The Chicken Coop.

I finally got my peeps yesterday, eight Buff Orpington chickens. They all appear to be healthy and are pretty fun to watch. Our son really likes watching them too. Now comes the hard part, I’ve actually got to build the coop. Once I get started on it, I will post pictures of the design and my progress.

In other news we got the garden planted today. This is year number four of our attempts at gardening. I’m thinking that this one will be our most successful yet. And since every previous year has been a near disaster, it won’t take much for this year to be an improvement.

For those of you who have found this website through links on various websites  or through search engines, welcome and  I hope you stick around for a bit and enjoy the articles I’ve written.

If you’ve come here from one of my other websites then much of the content here is already familiar to you. Timothyyordy.com is an attempt to simplify and streamline my web efforts and gather all of my content into one place. My hope is that doing in doing so I will be better able to focus my efforts into things that are more impactful than perhaps some of my websites have been in the past.

All of my archived articles from other blogs have been copied to this new domain but some of the content still needs to be created so bear with me.

Thanks for stopping by

-Tim

I’m just beginning to put this new website together. So bear with me as I gather all of my articles from my various sites into one. You could say I’m downsizing a bit but really becoming a much more efficient machine in the process.

Next week I’ll be taking a vacation from work for the first time in a year. Changing jobs a couple times during the past year has kept me from being able to take any amount of time off of work so this is a much needed break. My family and I will be taking a short trip to New Jersey to visit some relatives and then I’ll be spending the rest of the week doing work around the house including recording some new songs and working on some websites. So I won’t be at my job but I’ll be doing work at home.

I think I’m going to take the week off from articles on here as well. After many political articles in a row I’m feeling a bit drained from all of it. Monday’s article Electing a King, pretty much sums up the best explanation I can figure for what America is possibly about to do. The implications of not only the outcome of the presidential race but also senate races will have far reaching effects for many years to come and right now I just don’t have the energy to keep writing about it. So I will return with new articles November 3rd, right before the election. And if I am as productive as I hope to be with my time off then hopefully I will be able to share some of what I do next week with all of you

This has certainly been the biggest posting gap ever in the history of this blog and I sincerely apologize. My dialup internet connection was almost unusable for the last several weeks and I think somewhere in my sub-concious I just didn’t want to deal with trying to be productive on dialup anymore knowing that highspeed internet was coming.

And the cable internet has finally arrived! I know that many people have issues with Comcast and maybe someday I will have issues as well but for right now I couldn’t be happier with them. They put in a good deal of effort to make me a customer, not the least of which was running a line 1200 ft back our lane. I’ve already had a couple of annoying interactions with their customer service department but I have to say the guys in the construction department were great. They were all quite friendly and able to answer all of my questions, including giving me accurate timeframes for when all of this construction would take place.

I disagree with Comcast’s choosing to limit customer’s bandwidth to 250 gb a month, though I don’t know that it would ever affect me, but I have to keep one thing in mind even if it ever does affect me: Comcast went to a lot of trouble to make me a customer. Whereas Verizon has made absolutely no effort to provide service to any of the houses in our area. I had been on their “future notification” list for more than 4 years now and been told the lie so many times from their customer service people that “they are constantly expanding their network.” Yeah right.

I do 90% of my writing on my lunch breaks at work using a bluetooth keyboard paired with my smart phone. Tonight though I’m sitting up in bed writing late at night. I’ve gotten only about 6 hours of sleep in the last 48 hours but I needed to stay up and do this. After many months I finally finished the first draft of the first chapter of my first novel. Now you are probably saying to yourselves, “It took you that long to write one chapter?” Yes I know it’s pretty bad but I’m proud of myself none the less. At 3,988 words it is the single longest piece of fiction I’ve ever written. And now your probably saying “that’s the longest thing you’ve written and you’re trying to do a novel? Your mad I say, mad!” Okay hopefully no one gets that worked up over my blog. Part of the reason that I’m jumping into writing a novel without writing too much other fiction is because I just can’t seem to wrap my head around the idea of short stories. All of my story ideas are of such a larger scope than could possibly fit into a short story. And probably 85% of short stories and novelettes that I’ve read by other authors all feel like they are just a chapter in a larger story that they author couldn’t quite write so they just pasted some ill-fitting ending onto the story and it ends like a car wreck. I definitely want to avoid that.

And while 3,988 words over the course of several months probably doesn’t sound like much at all, I feel the need to mention that during that same time period I wrote more than 20,000 words on this blog. So I’m not quite as lazy as it may seem. But those kind of lopsided numbers do call into question how I spend the time I have available to write. I enjoy writing non-fiction but I love writing fiction. There’s something about crafting a good story that lights a fire in a person’s soul.

At this rate I will probably have the novel done by the year 2012. Which is no good at all. I do hope to increase my writing productivity but I’m also realistic. I’ve seen some authors say that a book should take about six months to write. That’s fine if you make your living as a writer. But for us aspiring writers, we have to keep normal jobs that pull us away from writing if we would like to continue to eat. It took me four months to write the first chapter. I’d like to write the next one in a month. That would be like quadrupling my productivity. Ask me on September 1st if I achieved my goal.

Well this certainly does nothing to help me get out of the rat race but it does keep a roof over our heads and food on our table. I decided that I would take the severance from the company I currently work for rather than let them give me a pay cut or more responsibility and the same pay. I was able to make this decision because I got offered a job at another company. It’s still retail but it’s with a company that is at the top of the pet supply industry instead of at the bottom of the office supply industry like where I am at now. I really think it is only a matter of time until this company is bought out or goes out of business all together and I would rather not be around for either scenario. I did find out today though that they were going to offer me the assistant manager position, albeit for the same money I was currently getting.

One of the really cool things is that my new job is only a 10 mile commute. So I’ve fulfilled my mission of a 10 Mile or Less Commute. When I first started that idea I never knew that I would be accomplishing it so fast. But a failing company helped make that a reality.

Another cool thing is that today is my last day and I don’t start my new job until Monday so I’ve got several days off that I can really try and act out my Beating Your To Do Lists ideas.

I really don’t know what this new job will be like. All signs point to it being better working conditions than what I have been dealing with. I did some quick math and was able to estimate that I will be spending about 80 less hours in my car each year simply because of having a shorter commute. I’m still thinking about getting a scooter to drive to work because of how good the gas mileage would be but I think it would take a couple years to actually pay for itself so I’m not sure about that yet.

Monday begins yet another chapter in my working career. The adventure continues.

I hate making entries like this because I feel like I’m adding nothing of real value to my readers lives. On the other hand this website is supposed to chronicle my journey in life.

So apparently I won’t find out for another week and a half whether or not I still have a job with the company I’m currently with. It seems that they want to wait until the last day to tell everyone who is getting a new position who is getting laid off. I’m not sitting around though I’ve got interviews with other companies coming up so hopefully something good will come from that.

I think the part of this whole thing that is really frustrating is that it feels like I’m just digging myself deeper into the Rat Race by either surviving this corporate restructuring or beginning a job at yet another company.