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.