At risk of heresy, SICP isn't all it is cracked up to be. It certainly isn't worth quitting your job over. Any author who feels the need to include that many footnotes is being extremely inconsiderate to the reader.

I barely remember anything from the book, other than the pointless factoid about MIT's first president dying while saying "bituminous coal."

A better approach would be to get the problem sets for the SICP class, and see how far you can get without actually reading the book. Then just read enough so that you can finish the problems. Maybe use javascript instead of scheme, so it isn't a complete practical waste.