What a professional glass artisan REALLY does

I have my first cup of coffee in front of me in the ridiculously huge and absolutely necessary New York City Starbucks Skyline Series mug. It is absolutely necessary as today, January 15, I sit in front of my laptop and try to remember/enter into Quickbooks/resolve all of my expenses since June 2005. It is Sunday, a day of rest for some. I must be wicked as there is no rest for me. Every January I spend days trying to find all the wrinkled receipts and little scraps of paper on which I have written mileage and expenses without receipts. Then I enter them all into Quickbooks (which I use to manage my business finances) and balance them against Quicken (which we use for our family finances). I wouldn't have to do this step if I always used the business credit card to pay for business expenses and maintained a real petty cash system. But, duh, "artisan", not merchant, not banker, not stock broker, not accountant...

The financial management process (and the process of writing this blog) is made more difficult by the background sounds of my husband kicking a dead ladybug under the couch in front of my four year-old daughter who tragically proclaims at the top of her lungs "Her name is Martha and he killed her!". So I digress.

An obvious question at this point is "So what does this have to do with the exciting new path in the journey?" and the answer is "nothing". This blog picks up in the middle of my life as a professional glass artisan. A lot has already happened. I hope a lot more will happen. There will soon be some very exciting events that I wish to be ready to chronicle as they happen.

Much of this journey I am on is spent on mind-numbing "other things" and today is slated for "finance". Tomorrow is "website renovation" if I get "finance" done today (not likely).Tuesday is for "slippage", the technical term for "I have no idea how long this will really take" + real life. Maybe I will actually make it into the studio and work with glass on Wednesday. Or maybe I will have to spend all Wednesday on cleaning and annual organization (I did inventory last week and one of the things I inventoried was number of dust bunnies. It was impressive).

So "heigh ho, heigh ho"... or maybe I will pick up where I left off yesterday. I spent the entire day figuring out the html required to change the look of this blog. I picked the nicest template I could find, but a template is not personal. At the end of the day I had it mostly done and then I rolled back all the changes I had spent the day on opting to keep a perfect, pristine look over a not-quite-finished, far-from-polished but personal look. Maybe the colors are not all changed and coordinated and some of the graphics are a bit weird, and who knows if all the links and actions will work right, but the point of this blog is the journey. Now I am meta-blogging. Anything to avoid spreadsheets and Quickbooks!