Office and Official!

Coffee in the Austin skyline mug, "Leaving on a Jet Plane" covered by Me First & The Gimme Gimmes on iTunes. Yes, it is a sad Monday. The Sprout and I took the Spouse to the airport this morning. But he'll only be gone for four nights. He'll be back to us Friday night (for the entire following week!--It's spring break, doncha know).

Finally today I get to share pics of my main super-secret project of the past couple of weeks. I did it as a surprise for Dave but he said J and I dropped hints like anvils and he had pretty much guessed. But the visuals are still pretty impressive. Some might wonder why photos of the home-office re-do would show up in a glass business blog. The state of the home office for the past several years has had a serious impact on my ability to actually run a business. I thought businesses had to have files, file folders and file cabinets--as did well-run households. Turns out I was wrong.

For people like me--people who don't even bother to take the time to put on make-up in the morning, much less regularly file all the scraps of paper that accumulate on our desks--the optimal solution to having all the paper I need, having it in a place where I can put my hands on it without too much troubles *and* maintaining the organization with minimal effort is to have paper-sized plastic boxes labeled with home or business and the year. Sure I need a couple more boxes than that (like ones for owner's manuals, J's medical stuff, J's school stuff, J's art, Christmas cards, and photos) but I don't need all the fussy little manila folders I used to have languishing almost empty in green hanging folders in a dust-and-paper-covered file cabinet.

Both my bookkeeper and my accountant convinced me I need to keep all the old invoices and receipts from previous years, but I didn't need to sort them by vendor or month or anything other than year. If I get audited (knock on wood) I can deal with sorting the appropriate years. In the meantime, I can get on with Real Life.

The craftsman oak furniture that used to fill the office is mostly now over at the studio (where I do have a lot more "stuff" I need to store--like trade publications, more office supplies, etc.). I need nifty surfaces over there to put stuff on, and there was exactly the right amount of room in the office for everything but the old desk. Never fear though, it found a good home as a donation to a non-profit.

Now for the big news of the day! My partners Bill and Elaine Snell and Todd Briske have come through again (though Todd doesn't know it yet--he'll find out when he gets back in town on Wednesday). In June Bill and Elaine are going to Dallas to represent Siyeh Studio and Black Cat ArtWorks at the Dallas Market summer show. When you have a showroom there you have to be on-site for the two big markets of the year in January and June. Bill and Elaine are going instead of me because the market overlaps with BECon and I am attending it for the first time ever--and taking a really cool looking workshop on lost wax casting, "MYSTERIES OF LOST WAX REVEALED with Linda Ethier". But this is not the big news, this is old news (it's still big, it's just old and big).

The big news is that I have been invited to participate in an instructor workshop at Bullseye this summer. Bill, Elaine and Todd are making my attendance possible by taking on the entire set-up for the summer BMAC themselves--the instructor workshop is only held the week before the BMAC. I wish I were attending BEFORE I teach two sessions of summer camp, but I will at least have the summer camp to talk about in my 10-minute presentation on my studio, teaching, experience, etc. (they would like a presentation with slides or visual aids of some sort and everything. Wow.)

The instructor workshop will enable me to continue expanding the scope of my studio from solely production work and writing to teaching and even retailing and wholesaling glass. Yes, I think it's finally time to step up to the Big League and start selling materials and supplies and teaching regular classes. Gulp. Now off to get today's production kiln loads in and shipments out.