My "Life"

After my mom's death my dad & I kept the place going. This place & my dad became my refuge when my life fell apart-multiple times. (Mom died in 03", my marriage in 06" & my dd in 08", I also did 9 months of rehab in 06")

Then after my DD's death in the summer of 08" along came the economic crash in the early fall of 08" With this came a substantial loss of income since commission work became rare, the jobs few & far in between each other. (Dad had one builder that was a steady customer, ie "bread & butter" for the studio.) My dad had his social security to tide us over and them he got on as a paper carrier in 09"

The fall season is the busiest for the glass shop with all the people making Christmas gifts, etc. After the holidays & until the weather turns nice is the second best time of the year. Business always drops dramatically during the summer. Stained glass is an indoor hobby and come summertime everyone's busy outdoors.

At this point with the economy if the shop can pay for it's own supplies, then it's overhead I'm happy. Not surprised to have to carry some of the overhead in the summer.

I always expected & planned on running said family business. What I didn't expect was to have to do it on my own w/no partner to help me. I just never thought about it after I got divorced. (doh) RThe shop's business hours are Tuesday thru Friday, ten am to five pm and ten am to two pm on Saturdays.

My life consists of hauling my ass out of bed every morning at one am and going out to deliver 470 newspapers. I get home between five and six am where I usually go back to bed to make up the sleep I didn't get the night before. I get back up about nine am to open up the glass shop. I close it at five pm and then spend several hours unwinding before I can fall asleep just to crawl back out of bed at one am and do it all over again. Sunday and Monday are my weekends. I usually just want to sleep. And I try to run my errands on Mondays. So Sundays are really the only "free" time I have. And to top this all off there's lots of yardwork too. The good news is the house and shop are in one building.

I figure with the crappy economy and the second recession this will be my life for at least the next five years.

So here I am finally coming out of the overall mess of having my life ripped apart so many times in the past 6 years to realize I'm stuck here at the house/shop, unable to go out & do things with friends. Now that I'm ready to live and have a "life" I find I can't really have one. I'm stuck working, sleeping, working and sleeping. And I may still have to find another part-time job to make all the ends meet, including saving money, all the major car repairs I have looming, taxes and to be able to buy those jewelry supplies I want not to mention my teeth.

I'm starting to see my limitations and the drawbacks of trying to do this single handedly. So now I'm trying to find/see options to make this work. Things like what can I do to make my life easier? How can I manage my time & $$$ to be able to make this a fulfilling lifestyle and not one of boring, endless drudgery.

I'm looking at things like shortening the shop hours, being open by appointment outside of those hours. As this is the only retail stained glass business for two thirds of Oregon I'd like to be available to those who have come a ways to shop here. (Anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours)

I'm already working on plans/ways to reduce the yardwork-mainly to reduce my water usage & now my workload.

Another week or two and I will start meeting with a dear friend and hypnotherapist to help me with a lot of issues I have. Many of them are just re-learning and re-training myself to use the skills I ahve lost in the past ten years. Time management, multi-tasking and other life skills I need to be able to suceed and be the person I know I can be.

The first one is to re-train myself to shut down my brain so I can get on a regular sleep schedule. Before my route I was going to bed about the time I now need to get up to go to work. My brain is fighting me every step of the way on this. Between five and eight pm my brain keeps trying to "escape" by reading books and/or just screwing around wasting time, worrying or daydreaming. If I can go to sleep between six and seven pm I can get out of the morning nap schedule. This will give me a lot more time to get things done.