jim_p

I've said this before... for me the conundrum of LiveJournal is that I either (a) don't post because I have nothing happening, or (b) don't post because there's so much going on that I don't have time or energy to compose my thoughts.

The past couple of months have definitely been of the latter sort...

At the frame shop, we actually had our first-ever Christmas rush! I attribute this to (a) having been in business long enough to have a bit of established clientele, and (b) my new location being much more conducive to walk-in traffic. We even have a little bit of a post-Christmas rush because a number of photographers brought in stuff for a show that's hanging on January 2. I figure if we're doing this well in this economy then we'll be quite happy when things turn around.

One thing that helps a lot is the fact that I just landed a permanent part-time tech position, which means steady income and benefits. I'm working for Stratus as their (contractually required) on-site partner engineer at Red Hat. Stratus was in a bit of a bind because they very suddenly had nobody in that position so they called me in a bit of a panic. Having once worked for Red Hat I was in an ideal position. The disadvantage of this, of course, is that it takes me away from the frame shop several days a week, but I have a lovely assistant who covers the shop when I'm not there. I've trained her up and she's now capable of doing frame design and framing. She's a photographer so she already had pretty good chops in Photoshop and digital imaging. I couldn't do this without her :)

I'm heading to Vegas in January for a big picture framing trade show. Among the classes I'm going to attend there is one on selling art and framing into the commercial marketplace (every time you find yourself in a lobby or waiting room with framed stuff on the walls, that's a commercial framing job). In many ways this is where the real money is in framing (or, at least, the real steady money. A single $10K commercial order will make my whole month).

Then there's all sorts of stuff to do around the house. We've spent several weekends closing in part of our porch to act as a greenhouse so we can winter the plants in there rather than cluttering the house with them. We've also been frantically cutting and splitting firewood to keep the woodstove fed this winter. We also got a couple of portable garages to keep the cars under cover for the winter, and spent a couple days (including Christmas) putting them up.

Socially, I've not been getting out nearly as much as I'd like. There were quite a number of parties that I had planned to attend then scratched at the last minute because there was Too Much To Do around the house. We did, however, manage to get to the lovely Christmas potluck at the home of persis , jslove , and dhs . We had a great time and I'm now more determined than ever to Get Out More :)