Trying to turn my life around

I've merely been a lurker up until now, and just registered this account. I'm here because I want to turn my life around. Up until now I've been mindful of my money, and always kept track of bills at least 2 months ahead to prevent nasty surprises. I spent many years picking up various IT related skills to land a job which would give me a steady pay check. Unfortunately today I've encountered a series of events that have put me into a bad financial situation. This sort of thing has never happened to me, so it hit me pretty hard. Seeing stories here of people starting new businesses, failing, and getting back up again made me wonder if all these years of "playing it safe" were the worst thing that could have happened to me. It's all frustrating and it feels like I've been slapped in the face. I've always been weary of doing freelance work of the sorts, because I feared how it would affect my actual job. Now it's different, I want to make a comeback, I want to get my life back on track. The following are the skills I've taken up over the years. If you need this kind of skill, let me know. If I can do it, I will. I'm based in the Santa Barbra / LA area if that needs consideration. * PHP Development - This is what I've been doing for a living for around 6 years professionally, 10 years if you count using it on a hobbyist level. Programmed an MVC framework from scratch before Cake PHP and the likes were mainstream. Have dealt with the popular setups including Wordpress, Drupal, Cake PHP, code igniter. I can also pick up on frameworks I haven't used, including in-house ones (yes, even poorly documented ones). * Twitter Development - I've done Twitter API work in PHP, Python, and somewhat in Scala. I know the API limitations and have written twitter based API bots (not spam) based on a custom framework I'd written. * Documentation - I've done walkthroughs on setting up servers, as well as documented code in Python and PHP. Documenation is often considered a hassle, but I like doing it because I've had to figure out things the hard way before, and don't want to see others go through with that experience. Code documentation also opens up new ways of doing things that I might not have thought of on my own. * Virtualization - I've done some basic setup and maintenance of xen and vmware server instances running on debian and centos host systems. The guests ran on Gentoo, CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu. * Security - There's still room for me to improve here, but I've setup snort for IDS and firewalls (iptables for Linux and some pf for Free/OpenBSD). Also can audit PHP based web applications for vulnerabilities. * OS Installation / Management - Have installed many NIX based systems, including FreeBSD, OpenBDS, Gentoo, Debian, Slack, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, and OpenSolaris. Familiar with the various package management systems including handling non-repository handling. Yes, I can configure and compile a kernel from scratch. Familiar with system automation using bash, perl, python. LAMP setups - Have done installation of MySQL, PHP, Apache on various environments. Can install either one from package based sources, or completely from source. Experience with lighttpd as well as some minor experience with nginx. In both cases I've used fcgi for PHP integration. With regards to apache, I've done setups on both apache 1 and 2 series. There is still much I have to learn with configuration of apache, but I can manage virtual hosts, rewrite rules, and module installation (mod_php and mod_python). That sums things up. I hope this makes some kind of difference, that it helps me turn things around somehow. If nothing else, at least I went down with a fight.