C is for cabinet

I have a love of shallow drawers. I work with tiny little pieces-parts when I’m creating, and shallow drawers are great for storing all of them. One thing I’ve learned about myself over the years is that I need my supplies to be in at most two layers for me to be efficient and — more important — to be able to put things away properly when I’m done with them. Stuff piled in front of other stuff and tottering piles of boxes are the kiss of death for my already tenuous grip on organization.

A couple of years ago, I lucked into a 50-drawer library card catalog at a ridiculously low price — as in, I thought the price marked on it was for one of the sections, not all three sections plus the pull-out shelves, base, and top. Score! I pulled out all the card rods (stored away in case I ever decide to sell it) and cut foam core to line the bottom of each drawer. All of my beads and related supplies that fit in that drawer size live in there, and those things are always well organized and easily found and returned.

Last Wednesday, that little voice in the back of my head told me I should stop at a couple of antique stores along my errand route. I like to listen to that little voice, because she often has some really good ideas. I explored a couple of shops I hadn’t been in before, then stopped at a few more I hadn’t been to in years. At the last place I went, I found this cute aqua green cabinet.

Isn’t she pretty?

After a little bit of back-and-forth, she was mine, and then the proprietor and I tried to wrestle the cabinet into my car, which is kind of like a clown car in that I can get a lot more stuff in there than anyone might think possible (like the library card catalog — take that, skeptical antique mall guy!). This time, though, even with the help of two orange-haired skateboarders and the guy who parked in front of me, it just wasn’t going to happen.

So, I called my cousin, and he helped me pick it up with his big SUV on Thursday. It took about half a day to clean it up and get the drawers lubricated and put some drawer liners in, but it’s in good shape now.

I spent a bit of time rearranging up in the studio and populating her drawers with tools and supplies that were formerly in plastic boxes on that shelf you can barely see to the right. I’m not sure this will be her final location, since one of my goals this year is complete renovation of my studio, but for now it’s a good spot.

I’m still drooling over printer cabinets, though. I’ve been wanting one for years, but ones that are in good shape tend to be expensive. There’s a gorgeous one on eBay right now that is very, very tempting, even though it’s almost as much as I paid for my sec0nd car.

However, I do other creative work too, and the supplies for some of my other projects aren’t quite so petite. So, I’m thinking I need to recalibrate my drool toward something with some deeper — although still sort of shallow — drawers, now that I have my super-shallow-drawer needs covered. I’d love to get rid of all the plastic boxes and get the open shelving down to a minimum. I have my eye on a piece that just might do the trick, but it’s two days’ drive away, and I’m waiting on a shipping quote to see if it’s worth even thinking about.

B is for blocks

What is it about the blank page, the empty workbench that brings up so many blocks? Here I am, with a free afternoon to get ahead on some posts and a blank page, and my mind goes blank as well. Saturday, when I finished cleaning up my studio and had some time to play, same thing. No clue what to start working on, how to start to create something out of all that void.

(Aren’t these awesome?
They’re from my dear friend Alex’s Etsy vintage shop.
She has some cool stuff — check it out.)

This is why I like these loosely structured challenges: There’s enough structure here to lead to a start, but enough leeway that it doesn’t feel like a chore. That lovely letter B up there is a mark on the page, taking it from blank (another B word!) to started, a nudge along the road to filling it out, adding to it, weaving it into something. (Maybe not something great, or even useful, but something nonetheless.)

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Freedom within structure is the way I arrange my time. I’m self-employed and loving it, primarily for that reason. I have never been very happy within rigid structures, having to certain places at certain times day after day after day. The illogic of having to sit at a desk from eight in the morning until five (or six, or seven, or eight) in the evening, whether or not your work for the day was done, of rewarding the efficient with more work (but no more salary), never made any damn sense to me at all. [Omit long rant about the stupidities of corporate culture. Not that there’s anything wrong with you if you enjoy that sort of thing; I just don’t.]

I start each day, week, and month with a quick review of the things that need to be done, and then, based on what’s on the calendar, how I’m feeling, and what the weather is like, I make a plan. For example, last Thursday, my to-do list looked like this:

• project A: edit chapter 7
• project A: edit chapter 8
• project A: edit chapter 9
• project B: final correx
• pick up library reserve
• bank deposit
• pick up purchase from antique store
• write intro post for A–Z challenge

That’s a normal list for a Thursday. Here’s how the daily processing went in my head:

Okay, the antique store trip is time-dependent, since Cousin Jim is going to bring his truck to help me this afternoon, so that goes in the afternoon at 3 p.m. or so. 

I can knock out the final correx on project B pretty quickly and that project is due tomorrow, so I’ll get those out of the way first, then write the blog post. I don’t want to get behind on the challenge before I’ve even started, and it won’t take long.

After that, I’ll go to the library and the bank, then come home and work on the project A chapters for a while. 

The weather looks to be pretty nice today, and since those stupid early season weeds in the herb garden have been bugging me, when I need a break from editing, I’ll take twenty minutes to go outside and pull those. 

Then back inside to work on more project A chapters until Jim gets here. 

We’ll pick up the cabinet, which should take about an hour. If I have enough done on project A and he has the time, I’ll take him out for an ice cream or a beer (another bonus of self-employment — the boss doesn’t care if you take an ice cream or [small] wine break in the late afternoon). If not, we’ll raincheck it. 

Project A isn’t due until the end of next week, and I’m ahead of where I need to be on that project anyway, so when I get back home, I can fiddle with setting up my new cabinet or just relax until it’s time to start dinner. Or, if I feel like it, I can get even further ahead on project A. Or, do something else entirely. 

That’s pretty close to how it went down, except that I elected to deposit the check into the bank that has the electronic deposit option (love that!) and was in the zone with writing/editing after my blog post, so I plowed right into project A and put off the library until after the antique store outing. (We ended up rainchecking the thank-you.)

See? Flexibility within structure.

How do you structure your days?
Do you like all of your work days to have the same structure?
Or do you go with the flow day to day?

A is for Alchemary

Meet Alchemary.

After ten years of muddling along as a side business with no formal organization and operating under my own name, which I also use for my editing business, my creative business finally has its own name and identity: Alchemary.

Why Alchemary?

The concept of alchemy has always intrigued me. The idea of turning ordinary materials into the extraordinary has drawn the human imagination for centuries. For the most part, I work with humble materials, and I like to think that my creations are more than the sum of their parts when I’m done with them.

My home studio is on the second floor, overlooking a wooded ravine and among the birds. An aerie is a high nest, a place of shelter while at the same time being a place from which one can look out over a vast expanse and drink it all in. I’ve been playing with this word for a while, combining it with different words to find a combination that appealed.

the view from my studio (summer, obviously)

I don’t often have trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep, but one morning this winter I awakened around four (ungodly early for me) and just could not get back to sound sleep. I floated around for a few hours in that place that’s mostly awake but also sort of dozing, playing with words and thoughts and dreams. Formalizing my business had been on my mind, and the last piece I needed before I could start taking action to push it to the next level was a name. I was thinking about the qualities that I want my work to embody, what I want the name to say about my work, and then it struck me: Alchemaerie.

It’s a lovely name, and says exactly what I want it to say.

I fired up the Notes app on my phone and entered it, bleary-eyed and half-asleep.

However.

It’s just about impossible for normal people to spell. Even I kept typoing it, and I work with words for my living. So, into the simplification hopper it went, where the “aerie” came out “ary.” Which still works, because “-ary” as a suffix means “belonging to or connected with.” Perfect.

And I know that the secret (or maybe not-so-secret now) origin of the “ary” is “aerie,” which gives the whole exercise a sense of mystery and a bit of play, which really appeals to me.

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So, that’s the name. I still have quite a bit of work to do: finalizing paperwork, deciding on my logo, opening a bank account and other accounts, updating my sales tax account, finalizing the new website, new business cards, and so on, and so on. But the biggest psychological hurdle is out of the way, so look out, world!

April A to Z project

Next month I’ll be participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. The framework is a post every day except Sundays for the entire month of April, writing about a subject starting with the letter A on the first day, B on the second day, and so on.

I love this idea, because it provides some flexibility within the structure — one of the things I love best. I’ve decided not to work on any particular overarching theme, but just write as it comes to me. While I like the challenge of having to write something nearly every day, I think being able to go with the flow will be important for me so that I can stick with it.

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March has flown by. What started out to be what I thought would be a light month workwise didn’t end up that way.  I’m ending the month with a full schedule of work projects, and good ones at that. Still, I’ve managed to take a day off here and there, and have been making some progress on some personal projects I have simmering on the burner. Stay tuned.

the light, it’s bright!

Done. Finis. Twenty-eight manini things in twenty-eight days. There is light at the end of the tunnel. And there is lightness in having twenty-eight fewer things hanging out on my to-do list for far too long.

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I finished the till closets on Wednesday. (“Till” comes from Aunt Donna’s word “tilly” for the utility room — kind of like a mudroom/laundry room/storage room.) Ours is the room between the garage and the foyer; it used to be the laundry room before the previous owners moved that upstairs. They replaced the laundry machines with six floor-to-ceiling cabinets, which is really handy since we have no basement.

The downside is that this is also the cat box room, so the litter dust tends to accumulate in every nook and cranny if you don’t keep up with it. (We don’t keep up with it.) Stuff has to be sealed up very well in plastic or washed down thoroughly whenever it’s taken out, so we tend to keep infrequently used stuff (spackle, paint cans) or stuff that is used so often the dust doesn’t have time to accumulate (cat food containers, cleaning supplies) in there.

Things had been frolicking behind closed doors and it was a bit of a mess, so Wednesday afternoon I went cabinet by cabinet — including the giant one under the utility sink — and took everything out, wiped it all down, wiped the cabinets themselves, sorted through the stuff, and put it all back in a more organized way. This of course involved a trip to Target for a few plastic boxes and storage thingies that fold open and make drawers for cabinets to contain rags and the wobbly lightbulb mountain (I’m hoarding, because I have yet to find a fluorescent I can stand).

Three hours later, it was clean and organized and ready to go. I even put out the new rug and changed the burnt-out lightbulb in one of the fixtures. Done.

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Yesterday was the marathon day: front closet, hook hanging, office cords, plant potting, and class planning.

The front closet wasn’t too bad. The biggest thing was just figuring out what was in there, other than my packaging supplies, which I always have to fight through other stuff to get through. I hate stuff piled in front of other stuff, so the goal was to get everything confined to the shelves across the back and leave the floor space for only that one giant rug, the carpet cleaner, and the boxed Christmas tree (which I haven’t put up in nearly ten years and really should get rid of, but I just can’t bring myself to do so yet).

Problem discovered: I had crammed four giant boxes of paper crap into the back of that closet. Two of them still had labels on them from when I moved back to the mainland. In 2002. (For the math-challenged, that’s eleven years ago.) A quick peek inside revealed stacks and stacks of email printouts (WTF, right?), most of them about ancient book projects and/or from people I haven’t spoken to in a dozen years. One box was every single scrap of paper that ever crossed my desk in relation to my high school reunion (I used to be the reunion chair). I quickly flipped through, pulled out the obituaries, one copy of each of our directories, and a very few other things, and put the rest aside for our next city shredding day in May. The final box looks like some more reunion stuff but also some old financial files; I’ve set that one aside as one of my March projects.

After getting those out of there, there was room for everything else only one layer deep, so all I had to do was some simple rearranging. Done.

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Then it was time to hang some hooks. My closet is generally pretty well organized, being a wall of cubbies and adequate (if not extensive) hanging space. Still, I wanted to hang some hooks for my scarves and belts and my few most-worn necklaces. The hooks for my scarves I’ve had for a while; I pulled them out of my first house, two houses ago, in fact. A couple months ago I bought some smaller ones for jewelry and belts, but just never got around to hanging them up. Fifteen minutes with the drill and done.

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Since I had the drill out, it was time to wrangle some cords. Several weeks ago I ordered some cord management supplies from Ikea; they showed up last week. I hung two of those wire suspender puppies from the underside of the desk, then even mounted the main multiplug surge thingie from one of the legs of my desk table.

There is still some work to do here — it likely involves an electrician to put some additional plugs where they’re actually needed — but for now, the only cords still on the floor are those going from the surge protectors to the wall, and one Ethernet cable that snakes all around the edge of the room to the printer. Computer cabling is not my department, however, so I’ll have to leave it to Awesome Husband to figure out if there’s some way to eliminate it or move it or something.

In the meantime, I’m going to think about getting some of those cord tubes to go along the baseboards to conceal what’s left. Done.

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Plants: I got ’em. Lots of ’em. I take cuttings, and the table that hold the cuttings while they root has been overflowing. During my Target foray earlier this week, I picked up some fresh potting soil [omit embarrassing story about lifting the bag out of the cart onto the belt and the whole thing ripping wide open and spilling potting soil absolutely EVERYWHERE]. I almost always have some extra pots lying around, so I gathered up a few that would be appropriate and went to work. Thirty minutes later, three new plants potted, watered, and placed, and a few new cuttings taken of other plants to get started for my mom. Done.

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So, on the last two items, I cheated a little bit, but I’m going to count them as done anyway.

Part of my quietude here lately has been the result of almost a year spent thinking really hard about what I want to do with myself and my time. As much as I think the idea that everyone should focus only on one thing is a steaming crock of crap, I have realized that I do have too many irons in the fire, and something has to give.

Teaching classes and workshops takes a TON of time, between coming up with projects, making multiple samples, taking photos, writing up instructions, figuring out and ordering supplies, making up kits, packing up all the tools and supplies and hauling them to class, setup time, cleanup time, and putting everything away when I get back home — for which I get paid a rather low hourly rate for just the time spent actively teaching in the classroom (i.e., two hours, in most cases).

This doesn’t even account for the fact that I have to order enough supplies to be prepared for having my maximum number of students, which is typically three times my minimum, and classes are just as likely to have the minimum as the maximum. Those supplies are often not things I use with regularity, so I get stuck with the extras.

At an event last fall, I was cornered and begged to teach again at a place I used to teach, but I never followed through. I’ve been asked to teach at another place I just adore, but have been stalled on coming up with projects that would work in that space and with their product mix. The last several times I’ve had a class cancelled at my regular teaching gig, I’ve found myself feeling a little relieved. This is all telling me something.

It’s weird, because I love to teach, but lately it just hasn’t been doing much for me. So, I’ve decided that after my spring session of classes, I’m going to take a hiatus from teaching. It might be a few months; it might be a year; it might be longer than that. I’m not sure.

The outcome of that as it relates to my February list is that I really didn’t have to make either a formal packing list or a spreadsheet for extra supply costs, and so I didn’t. What I did, do, however, was gather up my scribbled packing lists from the top of my workbench and put them in a folder along with my last supply cost list, on which were noted the relevant metals prices. This way, when (if?) I do come back to teaching, the raw material will be there to create the lists and the spreadsheet.

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Whew. This entry has been almost a novel, hasn’t it? Is this the time to mention that I found this whole exercise to be a great load of fun? (Seriously.) To reveal how wonderful it felt to plow through some of the crap that’s been taking up space on my lists and in my head for far longer than it should? To say that I think I might like to do this again sometime? Maybe not in a thing-a-day format — I don’t think I have enough little things left to do that — but maybe one larger project per week? I’m going to take March to noodle on that for a bit and see what I can come up with.

It’s been nice to have this space to come back to, for some accountability and for nudging me to get back into the groove of semi-regular writing again. Thanks for sharing Manini February with me.

Onward to March!

home stretch

One day left in the month, and the list is almost chipped away. Here’s my recent progress.

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I started magazines on Saturday, and finished those last night. I had about two feet of accumulation in the pile, some going back to early 2011. I roughly sorted them into three piles: art stuff, home stuff, and other stuff.

Anything in the other stuff pile older than December went straight into the recycling bin. I quickly went through the remainder and tore out articles I want to read, and gave myself a deadline of the end of March. Anything unread by then gets tossed. Fortunately, there really wasn’t much, maybe six articles.

Since we’re in the middle of renovations and I’m seriously starting to think about decorating, I wanted to take my time with the home magazines. I don’t get many, but the ones I do tend to have great ideas.

The art magazines I was mostly caught up on; I tend to read them right when they come in. For the moment I’m keeping all of those, so it was just a matter of quickly flipping through to see if there was anything immediately applicable (no) and then filing them up in the studio.

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I had to do some errands out near Mom’s house on Monday, so swung by there to pick up the sewing machine. Actually borrowing the sewing machine is half the battle in those sewing projects, so it counted as a project of its own. The actual sewing will be a series of projects for March.

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I made my appointment for my physical this morning. I love my doctor, and I don’t mind going there, but I’ve been putting off making this appointment. There were a few things I needed to sort out with the insurance company first, and that’s always a pain. And the last time I was at my doctor’s office, the receptionist was on the phone and there were sick, hacking people everywhere, so I didn’t stick around to make my next appointment. Now I’ve put it off so long that I can’t get in until June, instead of my regular April. But that’s okay. Maybe I’ll be able to lose a little more of the weight I’ve gained back before then so I can impress her with my progress.

Bonus: I also made a dermatology appointment. One of those spots is not like the others, and it behooves me to get it checked out. My regular doctor’s appointment desk told me she’d likely just shuffle me off to a dermatologist anyway, so I just went ahead and made the separate appointment. That’s next week.

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Another bonus project: After I measured my office painting for a frame, I started poking around to see what a frame might cost me. I ended up finding one at a decent price and just ordering it. It wasn’t quite deep enough for my painting, so I got creative and attached a couple of strips of wood to the back of the frame to beef it up. I finally got it all put together between yesterday and today, and it looks great! I’m so pleased with myself.

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More project goodness to come this afternoon.

catching up

So, that was a bit of a break. A perfect storm of regular due dates, rush projects, and minor crises conspired to keep me away from my February manini project for a week. But now I’m back on track and catching up.

I am supposed to be working on a rush work project right now, but they sent me the wrong file, so now I’m in a holding pattern until the new file comes in. Perfect time to knock a few things off the list!

This morning, even before the wrong file arrived, I cleaned up the baseboards. I don’t think they’ve been touched other than cursory dusting since this house was built the year after I was born, so it was time. Forty-some years of accumulated scuff marks from vacuums took about an hour to scrub off to a point where they were much less noticeable. One of these days we’ll repaint all the trim in this house, but for now this makes me feel better, not seeing giant gray smudges all over the baseboards at the top of the stairs.

Onward.

The next thing I tackled was organizing my business reference notebook. As much as I love the idea of going paperless, the reality is that, for me, some things are just easier to have on paper. Over the years, I’ve accumulated a bunch of style guides, memos about payment and other procedures, emails about pet peeves and name changes and such from my clients. And I’ve saved a few other useful tidbits here and there, too, like a chart of the Chinese dynasties (I work on a lot of Asian studies books). They’ve lived in a three-ring binder for the last decade or so, willy-nilly, no rhyme or reason.

I had some nice vinyl three-ring tab dividers left over from a project I worked on last year that is now over, so I pulled that notebook apart and reused the dividers to make divisions in my notebook for each of my clients (and subsidiaries, for a few). I tore apart all the stapled things and put them individually into sheet protectors so I can simply flip through to find what I need. And the binder is one of those good ones that has the rings mounted to the back cover, so everything opens neatly flat. A few non-client-related things have crept in there over the years, so I culled those and stuck them in a different binder to deal with at another time.

I even made a label for the cover and the spine. Done.

Next.

A long, long time ago, I kept passwords and other computer-related data in a little book. Dumb, I know. As I was digging through some shelves a few weeks ago, I found my little computer book and determined to do something with it. I had no idea if anything in it was still relevant (my Sprynet access info from 1996, anyone?), but figured I should check.

Very old Microsoft Office serial number: no.

Old address for emailing photos directly to Flickr: no, this is now a different address.

Very old assorted Adobe keys: no. Have since upgraded and have different keys.

Passwords for an email account I deleted: No.

Eighteen more pages of the like: No, with one exception. Exception entered into 1Password, pages shredded, and we’re done with that.

Now what?

Oh, the magazines… the magazines…

Got a good start by sorting them into piles and tossing those I’m just not going to get through, but the updated file seems to have hit my email, so finishing with that is just going to have to wait a while.

Growing the list

One of the major things I’m working on these days is getting Cleveland Handmade poised for some changes and growth this year, so it’s important to me to get a bunch of loose ends tied up in that area. We collected a ton of names and email addresses for our mailing list at the Last Minute Market in December, and they’ve been hanging out in my inbox, waiting for me to input them.

It hasn’t been a huge priority, since we don’t do much mailing to our customer list outside of show season, but it’s one of those tasks that’s been picking at my brain for two months now. So, today I took an hour or so and got everything typed up and entered into MailChimp. (By the way, I highly recommend MailChimp if you have a need to manage a mailing list.)

I have a problem

I am apparently addicted to T-shirts. Not T-shirts with slogans on them; all but a very small handful of those were weeded out years ago. My obsession is with plain V-neck T-shirts, mostly in gray, black, and blue, with a few other random colors — brown, green — thrown in there for variety.

These are what I wear to the gym and around the house almost every day, and layered under other stuff when it’s cool.

The T-shirt shelves at Target are a siren song for me. They manage to find perfect shirts more often than not: lightweight, sleeves not too long on the short-sleeved ones and long enough on the long-sleeved ones, generous length so they don’t expose my back when I sit down, and just the right amount of V: not too much, not too little. They’re flattering.

Two cubbies in my closet are dedicated to T-shirts, one each for long and short sleeves. Lately, because of my repeated forays into the black hole of the Target T-shirt department, those cubbies have become overstuffed, and putting freshly laundered T-shirts away and getting them out to wear has resulted in more than a few avalanches. I’ve also recognized that there are some that I just never wear for reasons I didn’t remember.

So, this morning I tackled the T-shirts as part of my February manini project. I took them all out, tried them all on, and found an even dozen to put in the bag for Goodwill. I refolded them and put them back, mixing up the order so that those I haven’t been wearing are now on top of the pile. I could probably stand to get rid of a few more, but this was a good start.

a better hardware drawer

Today’s escapade in the quest to conquer the February manini list was cleaning out the hardware drawer.

I’ve always had some kind of hardware drawer. I’m pretty handy, so it’s good to have an easily accessible place to stash hammers, screwdrivers, scrapers, tape measures, and the like. I find myself digging around in there at least once a week.

The drawer itself is not the problem. The problem is that we don’t have a good storage solution for tools and supplies we don’t use very often. They’re scattered around in different boxes and containers and on different shelves in different areas all around the house and garage. Conquering that problem is a much larger project, something like domino #4 in the string of things that have to happen before we can centralize less-used stuff.

But, in the meantime, I needed to clear out the odd stuff so we were just down to the basics again. I took ten minutes this afternoon during an editing break to do just that. I grabbed a plastic storage box and chucked in everything that wasn’t regularly used: leftover weatherstripping, mousetraps, the steel brush, plastic twine, battery-powered LED lights, etc. I also put all those bitty bagged things in that box: picture hangers, Velcro strips, felt bumpers, cable ties, etc. We do use those often, but the bags get in the way and make a mess, so I thought it would be easier to put them in that box and then just put the box in the till.

Now the hardware drawer is cleared of nonessentials and much easier to navigate.