A Long Weekend...

Well, for me anyways.
The concept of long weekends has not really been something I've relished for the past several years, since I worked from home and basically worked everyday. But last week things changed and I started a new job that actually required leaving the house. By the time I got home each day more than 12 hours had passed. Matt would leave the house 3 and a half hours after me, but would still get home before me. To his credit though, Matt did come down with me on Monday morning (that's a 5 am wake-up call) and for a guy who loves his sleep, that was very sweet of him, especially on his day off. Still, you can imagine my reasons for not loving the new job...
Of course, when you're faced with the probability that you may lose something (ie. a job, or freedom), you realize just how valuable that thing may be after all.

In this case, just a week into the new job, all the new hires were told that some of us would be laid off. Ouch! And we wouldn't know who the company would be keeping and who they'd be laying off until later this week. If you've ever thought about slacking off at a job, well then too bad for you. Pretty much all the stuff we'd been doing for the past week was a way to rate who to keep. Not like they had been planning to get rid of people, but with the lagging U.S. economy, their projected sales were not as high as they'd expected so they don't have the budget for the amount of staff that was hired.

So if you haven't already guessed, I was one of the ones who was kept on. Hence, the long weekend. I had prepared myself for bad news, that it wasn't the end of the world if I didn't get called back. But it is a bit of a relief since it'd taken me about nine months of job hunting to land this position. That's a whole other blog post that I will hopefully get around to writing soon. It'll be interesting to see who else is at work on Monday. Toronto certainly doesn't have a shortage of artists and creative types, so I feel for those who didn't get good news.

Today I've been house bound and am loving it. Working on a custom calling card and my own business card which I ran out of weeks ago, but haven't really needed since my shop sales have been kind of slow. That's the downside of working out of the house. I don't have internet access and by the time I get home, I'm too wiped to do anything but veg. Ah, well. Gotta pay my dues. And pay those bills.

Tomorrow is UN Day. The image above is from a yet to be published book that I worked on a while back, the second in the TCK series by Jen Munnerlyn. No new photos or illustrations to show, so old ones will have to do.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Just a quick post before we sit down for our holiday feast. Yes, Thanksgiving Day is almost over in Canada, so this post is a little late. And yes, that's a frog, not a turkey. But I don't normally draw turkeys (or frogs for that matter), so a frog will have to do.

A big thank you to my lovelySweet Shop customers for helping me reach 800 sales the other day! Hope my fellow Canadian readers are enjoying the day and enjoyed the long weekend too. It was gorgeous here in Toronto and Matt and I ventured out to the beach to take in possibly the last warm weekend this year. The rest of the weekend was spent revamping my website, but I've not yet uploaded the new files.

I think it's about time to eat. I'm VERY grateful for my sweet hubby who made dinner tonight. Yum!

The Times, They Are a-Changin'

It's Sunday, so what better day to reflect on things of the week past. The Clothing Show was pretty good, as my sales improved from the first show I did back in Spring - thank you to all my buyers for your support and purchases!- but they weren't so spectacular that it's convinced me to do another one again. Plus, as my post title suggests, the times, or should I say my times will be changing, so who knows if the show circuit is in my near future?



The most significant change coming up, or the one that has me feeling mixed emotions, is my acceptance of a job outside of the house. While I'm happy to have gotten the position - I've only been applying for jobs since the beginning of this year - it will require me commuting close to 2 hours each way, 6 days a week. Plus, rising hours before the sun comes up. Not a lot of fun, especially since darkness pervades these mornings leading up to winter. I swore that I would never take a job that required more than an hour of commuting one way, but (here I am quoting another song) you can't always get what you want.

It's been several years since I've worked outside of home - thanks to my dear hubby, without whom, I think I'd be in a heck of a bigger mess - and as much as I'd love to continue to do so, the reality of it, is that I'm not making as much as I need to be making to live a comfortable life in downtown Toronto. I'd love to say that I am. I'd love to say that Etsy allowed me to quit my day job. But really, my day job was working from my home. Well, IS, for now. For another week and a half. So my reality is that I have to quit my day job to make more money. How bizarre is that?



My big concern is that the new job won't allow me enough time or energy to devote to my shop and other projects and commitments. I'm also upset that I haven't been able to "make it work" as well I want it to. I know this is just another leg of my journey in life and so I should embrace it and take things one day at a time, but part of me can't help feeling like I've failed a little. I certainly am not going to give up doing what I love, but this post is also to let others know that I may have to close shop temporarily to maintain my sanity.

And speaking of sanity, Matt and I could only handle so much of Nuit Blanche last night before we returned home. We didn't see anything really related to the event aside from lots of people out and about, as we had our own adventure planned for the evening. Some people are okay with crowds, but we are not among them. I love the idea of the event, but maybe if I were 10 years younger, I'd be more into it. Hope whoever was out last night/this morning had a swell time!