the best piece of business advice i ever heard, is that you should surround yourself with folks that are better at what you do, than you do yourself. it makes a lot of sense. unfortunately, i am a sole employer/employee for my business. there are many days that i wish i could hire anyone else or fire my lazy bottom.
last summer, i tried to hire my daughter#1. she is funny, hard working and highly creative. unfortunately, most of what i need to do is both tedious, unimaginative and speculative. she spent hours last summer using a scalloped edged cutting punch. she cut hundreds of heavy weight paper business cards for me. it kind of messed up her hands, since she has delicate fingers. it seemed so unfair to use her in this deeply flawed way. i knew i needed her to help, but the work was crummy. she also helped me design some bracelets for an upcoming show. while these were very fun to make, they were made on spec. the show was in a fantastic location, but supported more lookers, than buyers. she attached loads of price tags to things too, which i find a thankless task most of the time. she NEVER complained. i sure would have. the reason i had her working on all of this was that i was sure there would be tons of money at the end of the day, that would be applied to her college tuition bill. i broke even. there wasn't much of anything left to pay her from except experience.
this year all i want her to do some drawings of the very fun characters she sees in her head. i want to try to convert them to blank note cards and maybe some stationery sets. i know i will have to nag or beg or wheedle or apply some other extreme pressure somehow to get her cleverness out into the world. she is a little reticent to go with yet another of my harebrained schemes. you never know who is watching or whether it is just the perfect time and place for this kind of thing, so we gotta try it out.
my son likes to make stuff too. he is the one who can look at my show tent and erect it flawlessly, without having set one up ever before. he is a mechanical genius.(as a young boy, he took his pocket knife out of hiding to perforate a liter plastic bottle. he added some string, duct tape, some fallen tree limbs and a garden hose. from these things, he made a tripod out of the fallen tree limbs, attached the hose to the plastic bottle and hung it over the tall tripod. when he turned the water on, he had a great sprinkler for the yard and running under on hot days... who would have thought of that? SURELY not i).
Nowadays,i fear doing a show without him nearby to help. sending him to college in september may be my most inconvenient choice to live with ever. he is also a great help at breaking the whole end of show mess down during the selling phase, he can charm just about any female into a pair of earrings or a nice necklace. i am amazed that growing up with sisters had done so much good for his abilities to understand women.
the clean up period however, for which i am not really concsious is where he shines. he can break things down and repack the truck. the first time he did this i was hugely suspicious. he is not an organized fellow who puts things away in his own bedroom, however he can haul my junk in no time at all,pack it up and unpack it when we get home. i am usually spent and working from a deep menu of no sleep at this time and this is my ideal, someone else doing it all. it is a really good payable skill set... his niche is essential. i would pass out otherwise.
the little one, makes stuff. i have to keep crushing her dreams. she likes nice findings,beads and old pretty things. JUST LIKE I DO. this makes her sharing my stashes a dangerous thing. she makes earrings and other jewelry. she constructs everything almost as well as my peers and i do. its hard to compete with that. maybe i can get her to harness some fresh and fun designs. she loves candy as a payment resource more than virtually any other currency that i can pay her in. this makes it all good. also she is prone to sharing which is a swell byproduct.
husband just shakes his hand at the winds and sidestand kibbitzes.
who needs a professionl kibbitzer? especially when stressed out to the max? i am pretty sure it just ain't me.
last night i wrote on for many more paragraphs and lovely photos of flowered goodness were included. i went to edit some of the little grammatical glitches and the whole posting went away with the winds.
i cussed and paced and gritted my teeth. needless to say, since i am adding this part, i will have to resurrect that portion of my post at a later moment. and for this i apologize heartily. it is unfair of me to rely on technology and machinery to keep all my thoughts in stasis, while i review them for clunky,misspelled , inapropriate structure or mislabeled photos. yet somehow i have done it handily. guess i need to get more with my own program. perhaps again, i am looking for the chance to fire myself from writing these posts? sure hope not.
til tomorrow or later tonight.
i bid you adieu!
xoxo.
W.
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