We have always anticipated and eagerly awaited the transition to both being full time on our business ventures, but we never quite knew when the right time would be. I guess God knew we weren’t going to be any better at making this decision than we are with having kids, and just orchestrated the timing for us in much the same way we ended up with both Maeve and Maverick – it’s not like a miraculous conception where we had no involvement in the matter, just an orchestration of circumstances somewhat beyond our control =)
We had been making decisions based on our goals of working together full time and being home with our kids, and had felt that it would be prudent to be in our own place before the transition. The small apartment we lived in for almost 6.5 years was not a very good place to anticipate spending most of our time with two very energetic children. So our move into a cheap trailer/small lot of land last year was actually a step up, despite any trailer trash stereotypes that may come to mind =)
We now have both a washer and a dryer, neither of which is in our kitchen! We also have a small overhang for our car as well as a shed. We even have a little nook for an “office” apart from our living room, which is swell. We have two porches, which both need work, but are fun nonetheless, and we wasted no time in scoring a grill off of craigslist. Probably one of the biggest things we are stoked about is the chance to finally have our own little garden this spring! We hope to be able to put up a cheap fence around our little back yard so that our kids can be outside most of the summer. We have access to a great little playground at the school across the street, but it’s a little more of a hands-on type of scenario than letting them run around in our yard while we work on the porch or something.
So when we started the move last summer, it came at a time when we were also approached by several new clients. With David only able to work on our stuff on weekends and the odd evening here and there, our time has always stayed pretty full with just the word of mouth we have relied on to date. Once we added working on the move into the mix, we knew we were done for.
This prompted David to request a move to part time with his day job and our Wednesdays became the new Friday. Even though this gave us two extra days, we still found ourselves playing catchup for the last SIX MONTHS. I’m amazed we made it through alive.
Obviously that sounds very dramatic, bu there really isn’t any way to fully get across the amount of work we had to try to fit into our days and the feeling of panic that we lived with just below the surface during that time period, never knowing at what moment the house of cards we had built would come tumbling down all over and around us. We can manage having piles of our own work taunting us from the corners, as much as we hate it, but when we have numerous jobs that others are counting on us to complete within a good time frame but we just can’t, well, it’s like one of those awful dreams where you need to run but you can’t move. Or one where you’re stuck in the twilight zone and no matter how much you try to hurry it is like you’re in slow motion and one thing after the other keeps going wrong to keep you from your goal. We even got tired of listening to our own reasons for why the work wasn’t done yet, even though they were all very real reasons. Of course in the middle of everything we had to go and do our own little computer version of a Chinese fire drill.
As much as the numbers that make up 2011 annoy me, we are already a million times more organized and caught up than we have been in the last two years, hmmm, make that in forever, so that right there is giving me warm fuzzies about the year. It is such a freeing feeling! We still have tons to do and projects out the wazoo, but now at least we aren’t so far behind that we can’t even think straight – thank you, God!!!
So after David went to part time, his day job decided they really wanted someone full time on his position and so a few months later he was shifted from production manager to special projects. All strange events and slander aside, short story – he went from being suddenly done in November, to planning to reevaluate after three months, to just being done after three months. And that’s where we have left it…
update: what actually ended up happening was that David went down to one day a week at his day job throughout most of 2011, and two days when they really needed help. God knows what we need when we need it!
This patent-pending start-up connects advertisers to consumers in a way that puts the control back in the consumers’ hands. The idea is based on the popular pyramid concept that rewards you through the development of your downline. Your downline watches ads and racks up money for you, which you then collect by watching a few yourself. Varolo mentions watching around ten minutes a day, which seems reasonable if you build up a good downline, especially if you can do a few things at once, like have the commercial on one side of your screen while doing something else on the other side =)
