squishy life update

My plan was to attempt weekly posts until the chaos settled, but that is currently too lofty a goal.

Owning a business is a lot of work!  Especially since I am learning everything.  Whenever I am feeling overwhelmed Robert keeps telling me I'm doing a good job for somebody who is trying to jump on a moving treadmill that's also on a moving train.  This is about the best analogy for my situation.  We went to the APA (Awards and Personalization Association) Conference the first week of February, which was SO overwhelming in so many ways.  But we walked away purchasing some much-needed equipment - a sand carving machine, UV Printer, and a new Laser.  Whew!  I have been learning about our current laser, which will continue to be primarily used by J, who is our graphic designer and engraver extraordinaire.  However, I plan to learn everything there is to know about sand carving and uv printing, so I will be involved in a lot of training.  We are also making some exciting updates to the shop itself - updating some areas, adding storage, and modernizing our showroom.  All this and I'm still learning the business itself and accounting.

My personal life has been chaotic as well.  Robert and I moved my dad up to the city and have been working on getting him into a permanent place.  Holy paperwork, prescriptions, and phone calls!  Taking an active role in his care and needs has been challenging.  He's very stubborn, has a lot of issues especially with mobility, and finding that sweet spot of autonomy he deserves but without falls or other scary happenings has been difficult.  I'll keep you all posted on the journey.  

One of Robert's sisters and her fiancé just moved to the city too, so suddenly we are flush with family.  

One of the two classes I'm taking this semester has been confusing and overwhelming, but I am enjoying my other class, which is Librarianship in Prisons.  Completing my degree is important to me, but it also feels very weird.  I will finally have the degree at the end of this year but may never have the word librarian in my job title.  While working on my business cards with J, we were puzzling over what my cards should say.  I really feel like an elf in Santa's workshop but I also spend a lot of time on the backend of things like accounting.  It's the first time in my life I've had to come up with my own job titles.   

At the end of January my brother Scott and his wife welcomed a new member to their family, Grant, so I have another nephew!  I couldn't lead with the most exciting thing though, could I?

I bet y'all want some pictures from the past month, so here we go!

Our winter has been particularly hellish.  I was a member of various tennis clubs for fifteen years.  In 2019, when I had my yearlong battle to mend some herniated discs I ended my membership, and I haven't been back.  January 2025 is the first year since 2020 where I missed an entire month of tennis due to shitty weather.  An entire month!  Thankfully, the first couple days of February were beautiful.  I told Robert the two most beautiful words were empty and dry.  It took three parks that day to find a court that was both empty and dry, and it was glorious. 

Just after landing in Las Vegas for the APA conference, all the lights went out at the airport and someone had to manually open the train to let us on.  However, the airport did have generators for the most important things.  Can you see the slot machines glowing in the dark?

Currently we have a Trotec laser at my shop, and it's been amazing, so that is what we purchased for our next laser.  You can make a lot of things in the laser, including these cool patches for your shoes, which is what their salespeople were wearing.  I also really liked this wall of trotec art.  

Margo and her boat.  Having my dogs with me pretty much all the time has been one of the biggest blessings in the past six months.  They bring me so much comfort, and we have so many fun adventures together.

Josie and her bed, which she lets us use sometimes.

Some mega exciting pictures of a small part of our backroom.  The first picture is the before picture.  We finished out some unfinished walls and added storage.  Everything from the ceiling to the floor is 40 years of adjusting the space to make it work over the years.  

We have unearthed some very weird things:

* Florescent lights connected to power strips in the ceiling.

* Drywall tape used as trim.  Fancy!

* 23 trashcans, 6 filing cabinets, at least 20 space heaters/air purifiers, and 11 office chairs were unearthed

* Cords that go to absolutely nowhere hanging all over the place.

* A door and some two by fours were used to make a desk (not a bad contraption so we still have this).

* The heating doesn't cover one third of the showroom or part of the eye doctor's office next door (thus so many space heaters).

* The refrigerator and microwave both plug into a power strip that leads to one of the restrooms (so many powerstrips).  The fire inspection lady (Margo's new bosom friend) has told us this is called daisy chaining.  If you ever see a pamphlet for fire safety where they show you pictures of what not to do, I'm pretty sure many of the pictures come from us.  You're welcome!

* The back doors don't seal and the cutest snowdrifts have been living just on the inside of the doors all winter.  Hell, it can't be a fire hazard with our cute little snowdrift buddies, right?

* False walls, cork boards, whiteboard, and pegboards that looked completely innocent on the front, but with backs absolutely chock full of spiders and nests so thick, they were beginning to build skyscrapers, urban green spaces, and their own transit systems.    

We are so thrilled to get some walls!

All of our items that are ready for pickup are now in one spot with some custom shelves.  Look how the bottom allows space for taller items!  

I keep finding really old stuff.  We were holding on to items customers didn't pick up in the 90s.  No joke!  This has been the oldest find so far - an unopened burn cream tube from a first aid kit with an expiration date of 1987.  Robert joked that at least burns aren't something we need to worry about.

Margo really needs you to know she's the most important part of this post, so the post is ending with her.

comfort in the midst of screaming saws

This past week in pictures:

I'm going to call the person I work with "J" just to make things easier.  J and I have been trying to figure out how to categorize, describe, and list products and customers in Quickbooks.  It's a surprising amount of brain work.  

Margo has it much tougher though.  She's still trying to figure out which bed she wants to have at work.  

Margo is definitely a distraction, but whatever stress I feel just falls away anytime I look at her.

Both Margo and Josie are much more content now that they go their separate ways to do their important jobs every day.  They come home very tired and barely have time to do their important home jobs of providing comfort to their stuffies before falling asleep.  

While talking to my dad the other night I told him I felt like my life had come full circle.  First, I took things apart in his junkyards, and now I'm putting things together.  I've been learning the fine art of trophy construction, which is really just keeping your effing hands away from the saw and screwing shiny things together.  

When a customer came in and asked how to remove a placard from something, I said (very authoritatively) you need a pancake screwdriver.  He nearly fell over laughing when I brought out a cake spatula (which is its real name).  As you can tell I don't spend a lot of time making cakes either.

I really have no idea what things are called or what I'm doing, but oh the mirth this brings.  It helps that I work with someone who is incredibly capable in this business and who also has a lot of patience.

The first time I saw the backrooms of the shop and the 50 old coffee cans with all the doodads (bolts? Lugnuts? Hoopty Hoos? Screws?) and the various screwdrivers and tools I had a small chuckle, because it felt like I was back in the junkyard.  

It's been snowy and chilly here, so eating cold salads almost makes me cry right now.  Not sure who else out there likes to roast vegetables, but I've been eating a lot of roasted tomatoes.  They are the best thing to eat on a cold night and you don't need a cake spatula to make them.

just a brief life update

This post has been a long time coming, but I kept putting it off because I didn't know how to write it and I also kept thinking a little bit of balance and routine were just around the corner.

I no longer work at the library.  I am proud to say that the library job I had for the last fourteen years was everything to me, and it no longer shames me to tell you that when I realized I could no longer keep it, it completely consumed and devastated me.  For a while, I struggled with both the loss of this job and feelings of shame for it being such a huge life crisis.  I spent a lot of time working through that, and I'm ok with how much the loss affected me.  I loved my job, patrons, and coworkers and thought I would retire there.  I wanted to work in a public library since the summer before sixth grade, and I carried that dream for a long time before it became true.  It was a dream I fought hard for, and the job was even better than the one I dreamed of having for so long.  

I am finally at a place where I can say I am so stinking grateful I had the incredible opportunity to work at a library and live the dream.

I am still getting my Master of Library Science degree.  I was extremely fortunate to enjoy both my summer and fall classes after a tough spring class, and I am taking two classes this semester.  I'm hoping to finish by the end of this year.  Though I do not have plans of returning to libraries any time soon, I still want to finish this degree.  

This month Robert and I bought a business together, an awards/promotions/custom gifts shop that has been around for over 40 years.  Last summer the owner, a longtime customer and friend of Robert's, mentioned she was thinking about retiring and selling the shop.  After many discussions, Robert and I decided to take the plunge.  We all agreed to finalize the purchase on the first of January.  While we waited for that to happen I did a lot of shadowing, learning the business, diving into accounting, and also much reorganizing and cleaning.   There are so many things you can customize, vendors to buy things from, there's outsourcing of some products and making others in house, and machinery/processes/products to learn.  It's been overwhelming but also fun.  At the library I was fortunate to hear so many patron stories and be a part of some of those stories in a small way.  In this new business I get to do the same.  Just a couple days ago, a librarian came into the shop with a fantasy baseball trophy, and when I asked what his league's name was, he said it was Moose something or another.  But the figurine was an owl!  So yes, there was a reason the trophy no longer had a moose.  For me, the stories and connections with others are a big part of my happiness. 

In September there was still so much uncertainty about my future job path.  In October and November I was shadowing and getting to know who I was going to be working with.  I work mostly with one other person, a very patient, capable graphic designer who is about my age.  In December all the transitions were happening and there was a lot of reorganization and cleaning going on.  And now I am officially there, still learning but getting a little more comfortable each day.  Right now the focus is learning Quickbooks.  We chose not to transfer all the product and customer information from desktop QB to QBO, so each customer and item is being added as we go.  Every invoice is a fifteen minute discussion.  Do we want our perpetual plate metal to be a different item from our sheets of metal?  Do we engrave enough business card holders and desk wedges to create a "Desk" category?  If we have multiple contacts from a local business/university/high school, how do we want to create subgroups?  What if we have two contacts from one school of pharmacy and they each have their own orders?  It's the kind of brain work I enjoy, but wooeeee there's a lot of it.

Right now we are getting a lot of fantasy football trophies brought in for updates.  These trophies are usually brought in each year by different people.  So we created a way to group each fantasy football league but keep their members as individuals.  

It's not just Quickbooks and bookkeeping though.  There's so much variety to the work and there is even a little bit of repetition and detail work I enjoy.  After the graphic designer puts together the designs, the afternoons are usually all about printing, cutting, and assembly of various plaques, medals, trophies etc.  

With the new accounting software, some reorganization projects that have things helter skelter right now, clusters of fantasy football trophies everywhere (the collective noun we've chosen is a "stadium"), and a snow storm that briefly upended us, we have not found our groove yet.  But we are getting there.

There are a few bonuses.  I do not have to ask permission to go to doctor appointments.  I can work longer if I need to or scoot hours around.  The shop is less than ten minutes from my home and even closer to Robert's office.  Josie goes to work with Robert, and Margo goes to work with me.  And probably the thing I'm most grateful for is that the other person I work with all the time has lots of patience and humor.  She is also passionate about the job, asks the questions I don't always think of, and isn't afraid of spiders, which we have been evicting from the premises thanks to our big cleaning sweep.  I am still working on my big feelings about spiders, but I feel like I'm having a lot of moments of personal growth, so it's ok I'm still flunking in one area.  I started to add the cleaning of different areas in the building to my calendar but realized (with some embarrassment) that once I make my way through all the areas, I need to start over again.  I can hear the spiders laughing at me about this.  And really, they're laughing every time they hear one of these conversations:

Who needs a vintage desk plate thingy from the nineties?

Oh, every year or so someone will ask.

Ok, we'll hang onto it.  

How am I going to remember to clean out those boxes with the vintage doodads though?  

Cue the spider laughter.  

My health struggles are still a mystery, but there is a procedure I'm doing beginning in March that sounds promising.  I had hoped the issues were exacerbated by the extraordinary stress I was under while working at the library the past year, but I haven't had much relief.  I was able to get a second opinion, and at the very first appointment the doctor was both exceptionally understanding and also told us what he thought the issues were.  That's the good news.  The bad news is that they're so booked up I have to wait until March.  Thankfully, I have the most understanding and supportive husband and also a job where I can have some flexibility about doctor appointments and restroom breaks.  

I will likely be a little flighty about posting in the next month or so while we work toward our new normal.  Thanks to those who have reached out.  It means so much to me.

dog joy

Some dog joy to start your week:

Margo met a friend the other day.  Everything terrifies this dog.  Not this mask though.  She did not want to leave it!

Is there anything better than coming across a fluffy and glowing creature from the heavens?  Look at those lip wrinkles!

Or going out for puppuccinos with the windows down in single digit weather?

How about some rare sister cuddles?

dog booty

Since we've started allowing the girls in our bed, they've completely taken it over.  Josie likes to sleep on our bed even during the day, so we got a special blanket to keep the hair down.  Every night, before going to bed I use a lint roller to get rid of any hair near our faces.  The dogs eventually discovered that the sound of the lint roller meant we were going to bed soon, and it became a frenzy of golden retriever excitement.  I've never known a dog to get so excited about the sound of a lint roller, but you know, if I stop being surprised and delighted by things, that's probably when you'll hear the ominous music start playing.

So anyway, I thought I would beat the dogs at their own game and use the lint roller in the mornings.  This has deeply confused them.  They can be anywhere in the house but when I start using the lint roller they come pitter pattering ever so tentatively into the bedroom and look at me like, "Are we going back to bed?"  This has been going on for a while, but they are still confused and somewhat hopeful every time.  Heaven forbid I don't do a good enough job with the lint roller in the morning and I have to bring it out at night, because they are still 100% excited about that.  

Recently I bought myself an industrial-sized lint roller with a metal holder (happy holidays to me!), and when I ripped off the first layer of paper, it sounded like a plane taking off.  No matter, fur was flying, tails were whipping, and before we knew it, we were engulfed in their fur frenzy. 

If you look closely, you can see the industrial-sized lint roller on one of my side shelves.  It takes up the full shelf!

I will say reading the news in the morning is ever so much more pleasant with a hairy dog booty in your business.

Tis the Season

It's that time...

For Spotify Wrapped!  And also Apple Music Replay!

I listen to a lot of music.  I live, breathe, and eat it as does most of my family.  Growing up, one of the best things we did was take turns picking music while doing housecleaning.  Music is quite literally fuel for me.  Not just for housecleaning but also for creating, moving, relaxing, being ok with myself, being ok with not being ok with myself, having a safe place for all emotions, and sometimes all it takes is a certain song to give me strength to step into the day. 

I listen to both Spotify and Apple Music for different reasons.  First, I have spent a lot of time scouring the ends of the universe for music that doesn't exist on either platform.  Seriously!  A recent example was an Aaron Neville CD that had a song on it that didn't exist anywhere - "Jesus is a Friend of Mine."  Dear Spotify and Apple Music, Aaron Neville is a legend  and his gospel music most beautifully highlights his voice.  How do you not know this?  

I get that some artists (ahem Garth Brooks) do not allow their music on one or the other and it gets very complicated.  Thankfully I have CDs of a lot of these artists (ahem Garth Brooks).  

There are also these incredible cds that Northsound put out in the 90s where you hear popular classical and jazz music with loon calls mixed in.  This is also why I still search for CDs anytime I see them at a used bookstore, library sale, or random thrift store.  You know how many times I see a version of a favorite classical song that doesn't exist in Spotify or Apple Music?  I would say about one out of six times it happens.  I don't mind spending hours combing through classical music for unusual versions of songs.  

Another reason I love Apple Music is that I have daily meditations, poetry, and other spoken word mixed in with my music.  Apple Music also allows me to cut out specific parts of songs and manipulate the music depending on my needs.  I don't want to hear "Beluga Heights" at the end of Jason Derulo's Whatcha Say every time I listen to it.  I also have a couple songs where I only like 30 seconds of a ten minute piece.  Sometimes to do this I need to purchase these songs individually, but because it's music, it's always worth it.  

I use Spotify primarily for my monthly playlists, which I usually create with extreme excitement the first day of every month.  The moment I hear a song that lights me up it's dumped in the new month's playlist, and I delete that month from last year.  This means I have only 12 playlists and no distractions for when I need to focus or am feeling a certain mood.  Because of the sheer number of songs I have and the years I've used Apple Music, I have dozens of playlists, and I get easily distracted by them.   

Both Spotify and Apple Music also recommend different music and my weekly lists of new music are always different between the two platforms.  I spend a lot of time both listening to music and searching through music.  It's one of the ways I treat myself when I need some me time.  I sit down and look up something that's recently resonated with me and everything related to it.  One path sometimes turns into miles and miles of music.  And each music platform creates different paths.

Here are my end of the year music stats.  I do hope you share yours with me if you are a fan of Spotify and/or Apple Music!

First up, it looks like I love Spotify and Apple Music equally, which I love to see.  It totally validates why I need both!

Top songs:

Turn It Up is probably the most balancing song for me.  Anytime I felt out of sync this past year it was like a hug from the bass Gods.  I sometimes found myself replicating some of the noises from this song when I was struggling with anxiety.  It's therapy.

I really like Tartarus because it sounds like the song is throwing a rage tantrum, which is a feeling I was quite intimate with the past year or so.  It's so incredibly cathartic.  Do you need to throw a tantrum?  Let this song take care of that for you.  You will feel like you are growing your own calm.

A World of Our Own is just so stinking beautiful I can't even stand it.  The crunchy sound is how I feel when all is right with the world.  It's also just the right pace to take whatever it is you're carrying and do whatever exercise you do until what you're carrying turns into just your heartbeat, that crunchy strength.  

I have loved Spiegel im Spiegel for a very long time.  It's easily in my top twenty favorite songs.  I love all versions of it, and it's one of the few songs I can listen to for hours.  Viktor Orri Árnason's version is my favorite.  The effort, resonance, reflection, and imperfections haven't been stripped away.  It's like what Kendrick Lamar says in his song Humble, " Show me somethin' natural like ass with some stretch marks."  This Spiegel im Spiegel has those stretch marks.  

Come up on My Side - I really don't have a lot to say about this song.  It's like music junk food.  I find it very amusing that the song starts with the word, "shit."  At least I hope that's what the word is, because I laugh every single time.  I have tried to find lyrics for this song, but I'm glad I haven't looked too hard, because it sounds like some questionable things are being said.  

There's a lot of sadness with "Shake and Stop," which was a song I used for spring storytimes, my last storytimes RIP.  Am I sad nothing surpassed it in Apple Music?  Nope!  This was just the dedication and love I had for storytimes shining through.  I used to sing my storytime songs to and from work, memorizing every little detail so that my mind could be freed up for the moments I couldn't plan, the fantastic, unbeatable chaos and energy of so many people uniting in their unique journeys.  

Dread was the song that woke me up and helped me start healing again.  I have only been listening to it since August, and it's the song that gets me going when nothing else will.  

Apashe has been one of my top artists for the past few years.  He's brilliant and takes music to places I've never been to before.  Devil May Cry is a masterpiece.  The build will literally lift your pulse right out of your body.  Right around 2:00 is where your life will probably change, and 2:30 is when you will realize that the song has completely moved into your body.  

Top artists:

Needtobreathe is always in my top artists but never in my top songs.  Do you know why?  Because I love most of their songs and listen to them equally.  Does anyone have any artists like this?

Levi.Sct was a new artist for me this year.  If you like hip hop versions of classical music, he's excellent.  

One of the cutest things about Spotify Wrapped is their artist clips where you can watch your favorite artists say thank you for listening to their music.  This year they did the clips a different way and I really appreciate how you get some of their music and what they're excited about.

Return to Biscuitland

Robert and I just got back from a very relaxing trip to Nashville, which we loved so much when we visited in 2023 that we had to go back! 

Here are the best pictures from the trip!

The dogs needed the vacation the most, and they made every moment count.  Lots of places in Nashville are dog friendly, so they even got to do some holiday shopping with us.  If you don't like your holiday gift, it's probably because they picked it out!

On our way to Nashville (sort of) we visited my dad at the lake and then drove up to St. Louis to have lunch with one of my writing friends, Dale who moved there a few years ago.

Before lunch Robert and I explored the Missouri Botanical Garden, which we've never been to.  While November isn't the best month to enjoy everything the gardens have to offer, it was the very first day of the model train exhibit.  We were the first ones in the door too!  We also spent time in the climatron and arid house, where I took an ungodly amount of pictures for future art inspiration.  

Though I didn't get any pictures with Dale, he picked an excellent lunch spot, La Bonne Bouchée Patisserie & Cafe where I had the Salade niçoise, which had both anchovies and tuna!  Why haven't I made this salad before?  Every salad I make for a while is going to be some version of this.  It was a wonderful lunch and so great to catch up with Dale, who has some wild stories and is writing them down for his family.  Hint hint nudge nudge to my family!

The next day we drove to Nashville, and the very first thing we did was go to Guerilla Bizits, which has the best biscuits I've ever had in my life.  I will spare you from a deluge of biscuit pictures, but I did find a pillow that matched my philosophy about life. 

We spent the week eating biscuits, swimming at the hotel, and doing lots of holiday and book shopping.  We also took a tour of the Nissan factory in Smyrna (sorry no picture taking allowed, so no pictures), and it was surprisingly fascinating.  We recently added several factory tours to our list of places to see on our travel list, and if any of them are as interesting as Nissan, we might need to create a factory list!  We learned the employees do different things at Nissan every day, so our plan is to do two tours on different days when we go back to Nashville.  It was incredible to see how how all the different pieces of cars come together (I lost count of how many times they need to take doors off and on), learn about the history of the factory, and discover there are good robots who are programmed to shut down when they come in contact with a human and bad robots who are programmed to keep doing whatever it is they're supposed to do whether or not a human comes in contact with it.  I'm sure Robert is rolling his eyes at this, because he got more than killer robot stories out of the tour.  

How do I describe the food scene at Nashville?  I know, I know this sounds like the beginning of an ode.  In KC, if there are dairy-free options it's an afterthought and we only have a couple vegan restaurants who have stood the test of time.  Nashville has many vegan restaurants and also restaurants who offer vegan or dairy-free items that are thoughtful and delicious.  Nashville is passionate and creative about food, and I have yet to encounter another city that is better.  

Recently, I have become aware that there is such a thing as vegan parmesan and it can be done in different ways.  One of the coolest finds was discovering three kinds at a specialty store.  

I have been collecting stickers for a while and am going to make myself a sticker collage to frame for my office.  I couldn't turn down a potato slut sticker if I tried.  Who thought of a potato slut sticker btw?  How are we not best friends?

Nashville also has not one but two craft and art supply recycling stores.  I know what you're saying.  WHAT THE WHAT????

The first, Smart Art + Craft Supplies has a lot of yarn and fabric and more importantly, tubs and tubs of beads.  The second, Turnip Green Creative Reuse is incredibly sacred to my heart because it focuses on the most useless, funked up bits of shit that you think nobody wants.  Prescription bottles, piles of eraser nubs, shelves and shelves of fabric and paper swatch books.  Turnip Green isn't afraid to sell stacks of expensive paper with a few doodles on them.  There's so much you can do with castoffs and abandoned art.  We have a place in KC called Scraps, and they started out this way, but over the years they have gotten more choosy with the stuff they sell and I no longer see all the weird tiddly bits (though they did have a barrel of doll heads the last time I went).  One time, when Scraps was very new they had a huge paper box filled with castoff scraps of paper that were about the size of my palm.  The paper was the kind of paper you find at fancy stationary stores.  It was incredible luck for someone who makes collages with teeny tiny bits of leftover paper.  Turnip Green embraces this kind of junk.  They also don't have prices on anything.  You just pay what you think it's worth.  I was like ok, here's all my birthday money bitches.  Take it all because I love you.  Thankfully Robert was there to reign me in and remind me we needed room for the dogs to come back home with us.

Sadly, the piece of plane you see in one of the pictures is not for sale.  

We also ate some epic BBQ (to balance out all the "chkn" and "tofuroni" and "nutnog").  Peg Leg Porker does something interesting with their rub.  They put some on after it's been cooked.  Anyone else do this?

We also stumbled upon a combination glassblowing coffee shop place (Glasshaus) and enjoyed watching glass being made.  They were just starting to make cups and the plugs for decanters when we walked in, and one of the artists was creating a playlist for this.  I love artists.

We hiked some too.  We spent Thanksgiving letting the dogs spread their dog joy chaos throughout the woods.

And we "hibernated" a lot, which happens when we get tired very early (like 7 PM) and go back to the hotel and just let the dogs cuddle us to death.  We both were wondering why we don't do more of this kind of lounging when we're at home, and I think it can be tough to ignore chores and work and laundry.  This is what the dogs tell us anyway.  They just have too many responsibilities to become professional hibernators.  

If we weren't cuddling with the dogs, our dogs were quietly destroying the hotel room couch with their hair.  I'll have to share my lint roller escapades in another post so this one doesn't get too long, but we didn't just flip the cushions over when we left (though we thought about it).  

This blue couch is the reason Robert and I try to get everything in the Pantone color, Golden Retriever Splendor, which is the most luxurious of the wheat and camel colors.   

On the way back I was grousing about taking the dogs out for a poo in a strange field behind a gas station.  It was SO cold!  And then the entire field erupted around us and we were caught in the middle of a murmuration.  I am still trying to find the words to describe this.