Positively Miserable

I just can't be positive all the time. Today is a real downer. It's not just today, but today I'm feeling it more than ever.
Life is supposed to be about constant change and a surprise around every corner. I could sure use one today.

All I see before me is a monotonous spread of days just like the one before. Frosted Flakes, treadmill, business books, yell at the kids, take kids to something to try and entertain them, salami sandwiches, work on my rugs, afternoon snack, read a book, try and find something to make for dinner, dinner, baths, solitaire on the couch while watching Chelsea Lately, Carl gets home, put kids to bed, watch Carl eat dinner, put Carl to bed, read until after House Hunters.

This can't be all there is. Should I feel the security of the sameness of it all?

I feel tired of being a mom 24 hours a day for the past 9 years. I feel tired of never seeing my husband. I feel tired of not having any money. I feel tired of feeling tired.

I just get the feeling that this everyday nothingness is not what I was put here to do with my life.

When will things get better? When will there be surprises and family vacations that are more than a 6 hour car ride away? When will I enjoy life again? Life was not meant to be a day by day struggle just to stay sane.

ARGGGHHHHH!

It's probably just my hormones, but I'm allowed a day or two a month to wallow in my less than stellar life.

It's nothing that a $25,000,000 check couldn't fix instantly.

I'm gonna step out on a limb and say that at this point in my life, money could indeed buy me happiness. It wouldn't fix all my problems, but it would definitely make the most bothersome ones go away.

Great Recession Update

There have been a lot of bad signs of the horrible economic times in town this week and it's almost getting a bit overwhelming.

1. The 1 and only Blockbuster video in town was seized by the bank last week. Customers and employees showed up to find the locks changed and the store stripped of everything. Apparently the owner defaulted on a $160,000 loan and the bank seized the assets of the store to be sold at auction.

2. The house down the street has gone into foreclosure. It sold in 2007 to a family from California for $900,000, but they just up and left one day and it is now owned by the bank and on the market for $500,000. That is really going to jack up our property values.

3. Another house down the street had a huge auction over the weekend selling the entire contents of the house. I don't know the particulars, but it didn't look good.

4. The bike store/ coffee shop/ snowboard rental store down the street from my office downtown is suddenly empty. We drive by every day and on Friday everything was gone and there was a huge for lease sign out front.

5. There are 2 more office for lease signs on the street my office is on. Another engineer is moving out, and someone else. That puts my chances of sub-leasing my space at slim to none.

6. So far this year there have been a total of .......7! housing starts in Flagstaff. Seven permits in 6 months. That is insane. No one is building.

7. We were turned down by every bank imaginable this last week for our new truck purchase. We finally found a bank in Minnesota, but every local bank wants nothing to do with us. Even American Express, a company we've been with for the last 5 years won't help us. It's ridiculous how banks have stopped lending on even the most mundane things.

I'm usually very optimistic, but this is starting to look grim.

The only consolation is that the shipping business is rocking. We are so busy.

Carl, who has been working from 5am to 7pm for the last few weeks, is seriously rocking a David Beckham physique. I guess running around all day in 80-90 degree heat lifting 50-150 pound boxes while running is a great workout. Who knew? He's starting to get hit on by all his late 20's to early 30's customers at the mall. He has become the "hot delivery man" to all the store managers.

I am sad to say that he currently weighs only 9 pounds more than me while I rock a Renee Zelwegger in Bridget Jones Diary or Drew Barrymore in Never Been Kissed type of physique.

I'm looking for a sign of good things to come, but I'm not too hopeful yet.

Tangible Evidence

It's working. I'm actually moving forward on my rug designs. I have 10 designs for me to tuft here in my studio and 10 designs to send to Nepal for hand knotting.

I've almost finished choosing colors for them all. I've contacted Nepal and I've ordered their color swatches. I've gotten my own FedEx account to make it easier to ship things back and forth to Nepal. I've started making my own tuft samples for my 54 colors that I already have here in the studio.

The next big steps are to get a rug up on my frame, start taking pictures for the web site, send my 10 rug designs to Nepal to get my 10 1'x1' strike offs to check the colors, then finish the web site with photos of the strike offs, and then start showing everything around.

I'm planning on taking a couple of days once school starts to go down to Phoenix and visit the high end rug showrooms and high end interior designers to show them my wares. Of course letting it slip that I'm an architect should get me right in the door, the rest is up to my rugs.

I'm getting excited. It really did work to just stop all the busy work and get down to what it was that I really wanted to do. The writing has taken a back seat, but that's okay. I feel good about moving forward with my rugs. If I am absent here it is because I am getting shit done and no longer writing about what it is that I want to do, but actually doing it.
Isn't that always the key to getting things done? It's so simple it bottles my mind.

The Climb

I think maybe I've got it figured out......why I haven't been getting anything done with my rugs. I'm procrastinating and I'm not in desperate need to get it all done.

I am trying to fill up my days with the other businesses, the kids, and trying to teach my self the entire Adobe Creative Suite. For some reason I believe that I won't be able to run this design business successfully unless I know how to create my own rockin web site from scratch. I am also trying to write, and to read how to write. If that isn't insane I don't know what is.

So anyway I was getting so behind in my Adobe Illustrator lessons and had just broken open the Adobe InDesign books to teach my self how to apparently do my entire book design myself at home when I came to the realization that it was just too much and that I wasn't really doing the things that I needed and wanted to be doing.

What do I want to do? I want to make and sell rugs and I want to write.

What was I doing? Everything but the above.

I can buy a web site from GoDaddy for about $5/month. I can just write and if I can't find a publisher for whatever it is that I write then I will learn InDesign to publish it myself, but I don't need to learn to do it now.

All I need to do is design the rugs, buy the web site from GoDaddy, take some photos and write some copy and I'm up and running. Enough with all this other busy work. It's just getting too ridiculous.

I know I've always had this problem. I can't just do 1 thing at a time. I am way too interested in way too many different things. But if I am going to be successful at any 1 of them I need to focus on it and nothing else in order to get it accomplished.

So I am taking a break from my very carefully planned lesson plan for the summer on learning Adobe and I am going to just and only concentrate on my rugs. I will be coloring, photographing, searching Getty Images, actually working in my studio hopefully with the tufting gun, and learning the inns and outs of the cheap web sites on GoDaddy.

I keep telling myself the site does not have to look perfect the first time. Once I start making money I can always upgrade it, but I need something and something is better than nothing.

And I hate to say it, but, I was actually inspired by Miley Cirus' song the Climb. It almost brought me to tears and made me want to work harder than I have been.

I might have to give up my Real Housewives in order to get shit done.

Small Biz Blues

We still don't have a new truck and I could rant and rave and get into all the particulars about credit being tightened, the problems in trying to finance a new used truck, etc, etc, but it's all frivilous details.

What it really comes down to is that it's hard to be a small business these days. I get so frustrated that in order to get a loan it's easier to have a pay stub for working for someone else than it is to get a loan as a small business owner.

If Joe Cool walked into a bank with a pay stub from a job he just got 2 weeks ago for a company that frequently bounces checks and is about to go under... a bank will approve him in 5 minutes because he is not self employed.

If I walk into a bank, even a bank I've been with for 5+ years, and they know I am self employed, I have to provide 3 years of tax returns and have to have a higher interest rate because I am self employed.

It pisses me off everytime. I can't be fired from my job, and I can't shut down a business with just 2 weeks notice. To me I seem like the more stable risk than Joe Cool.

I cannot stand banks. I just get more and more frustrated with them as the years go by. Where is the bank that is truly out to help small businesses? Why do we small businesses need banks so much? What can be done to make it easier to run a business and get the credit when it is needed?

Arghhh I am frustrated. I just need to start my own bank, or magically get into a situation where I don't need them to run my business.

Summertime

Okay so I know I am seriously slacking on the blog posts lately, but it is summertime and the children are running me ragged. That and we went to LegoLand and Disneyland last week.

Legoland rocked. It was a little rainy in the am, but it cleared up. It was Star Wars weekend. So there were storm troopers and Jedi's roaming the park. The lines were short, and the food is pretty good there, so overall it was a good day although very surreal with all the Star Wars characters.

Disneyland was horrible. When we were leaving the park we noticed on the billboards outside that they were warning people that the park was full and they were not letting anyone else into the park. Needless to say we had never been there when it was this full. We could hardly navigate the stroller thru the crowds. The stores and restaurants had lines as long as the rides. Then to make matters worse all the rides broke. The monorail, Thunder Mountain, the Matterhorn and Space Mountain were shut down. We did the best we could.... going on the carousel, people watching, and doing anything else that had a wait of less than 30 minutes, but still I don't think we went on more than 4 or 5 rides. This wasn't even the weekend. This was on a Monday.
I guess it was the beginning of summer and everyone had the same idea, but I wish we had just gone to the beach instead. I don't think we'll go back unless it's a cold day in November or February.

So anyway we're back home and I'm going to try and post more regualrly again. Lord knows I've got enough to write about with stories of the kids driving me insane and the madness that is going on in both our businesses. I'll try and keep up with it all here.

Consulting Architect

Thsi was the lovely view as the little one and I took our walk this afternoon. It makes it hard to complain about the artic tundra that we live on when it looks like this today....mild winds, sunny and 75, with beautiful bible verse clouds.

Of course the alternative to the winter is the searing sun that will burn you after 10 minutes in it's powerful rays. That is 8000 ft elevation for ya.

My dear hard working husband did not get home until 8:30 pm last night. So he officially worked from 5:15 am when he left the house until he walked in the door at 8:30. That is too long a day no matter what we are getting paid. He called around 6:00 telling me how frustrated he was that he was still working and he was driving past other dads outside playing with their kids, watering their lawns, or sitting on their porches.

Of course it makes me feel bad since I am not working and he is working his little ass off. But is their another way to do it? In my mind I have to be home all summer since the kids are out of school, but it would be nice if I could bring in at least $2000/month while I'm at home. Which brings me to the real question.... is there a way for me to work at home as an architect or in an architect type way without actually being an architect? Would it be possible to dispense all of my architecture knowledge without having clients, stamping drawings and taking things into the city? There has to be a way and I am racking my brain trying to figure it out. No one is hiring architects anyway nowadays, so what good would an at home consulting architect be to people? I don't know, but it sounds like someome somewhere could probably use my talents, but where are they and how much are they willing to pay?