Mar 5
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Winter 2027, Pt. 2
The kids safely off to school, I get back to the house, roll up my sleeves and get to work. Dishes first. I’ll start thinking about dinner after lunch, but I don’t like having to deal with dirty dishes when I start cooking. I just want to get after it when I do- I believe the chefs talk about their ‘mise en place’ and this is my way of setting mine. An empty sink and a relatively clean counter space means I’ll be ready to make myself lunch and start working on dinner when the kids get home from school.
The chaos on the counter is easier to control now. With the kids older, there’s more time to clean. When they were younger, it was triage, plain and simple. You did what you could when you could. Now, my house is cleaner- perhaps not pristine, but cleaner that it was. The chaos is easier to control, anyway.
After dishes, laundry. I empty the dryer first, sort that laundry and then place the clothes in the washer in the dryer and set that going. Then I tackle the mountain of laundry. Like Sisiphyus and his boulder, laundry never seems to completely go away. Just when you think it is, then, inevitably, the pile grows gigantic once more. Washer going, I take the dry laundry upstairs. Austin’s gets deposited on his bed- he’s old enough to put his own clothes away. The mediums I put theirs away and the baby gets hers put away. I put mine away and most of the wife’s- I have about 50% of her system down, but just when I think I’ve got it all down, then inevitably, I put something in the wrong place and that bothers her. And I don’t like to bother her.
Initial round of chores done, I get a cup of coffee and head for the basement. It’s taken us five years to build the business to it’s current modest size, but it began in our basement and it’s more or less stayed in our basement. We only just opened the shop after we found retail space after our move to Colorado. A lot of the work is still done in the basement- too much for the Missus’ liking sometimes, but I like it.
I had never paid attention to design. The Missus had her interior design degree and could make any room look good, but it wasn’t until my middle phase of podcast listening that I begin stumbling across people like Debbie Millman and Tim Ferris and listening to them as they interviewed the people on the forefront of any number of industries that my mind really began to grasp the possibilities and the importance of design. It touches everything. Even this blog post I’m writing this down in. Every object, every road you drive on- every where that civilization has touched, design is. It was sort of like seeing the Matrix in many ways and so, I began to learn more.
At the time, we were trying to get our finances in order. Between mortgage, student loans and other assorted debts, we were living, but not comfortably. We wanted breathing room and one of the many Dave Jobs we found on the Dave Ramsey website talked about buying old furniture, restoring it and reselling it. That was one seed.
The photography was another. A friend of the Missus rolled up her sleeves and launched an Etsy Store with knitted hats that looked adorable. We both like taking pictures, I thought. Why can’t we do that? That was another seed.
The feature on my blog, This Week In Vexillology began to run out of flags around the same time and I loved flags. I still do- my collections has grown into the hundreds now- but I wanted to look at the principles of flag design (there’s that word again, ‘design’) and actually start crafting my own flags. Serious designs. Professional designs. That was another seed.
Seeds seeds everywhere. The Missus wanted to get back into interior design. I wanted to learn HTML and coding well enough to great excellent web-based design. Tired of our dead end jobs Tired of working our hands to the bone for only flickers and fragments of time together as a couple or together as a family, we started casting out all these seeds.
Ten years later, our seeds have sprouted.
End of Pt. 2