Gone Fishin'

When not tackling the tax issues of clients up and down the eastern seaboard, Husband loves to fly-fish.  After another brutal tax season, my mild-mannered CPA suited up in his Orvis gear and took a well-deserved day off last week to go fishing.  He and good family friend, FishingBuddy, visited one of their favorite trout-filled streams in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.   This was one of those rare days where the big fish were biting and Husband got lucky.   He caught an 18" rainbow trout, a personal record.  Lucky for him, FishingBuddy always carries his camera to provide photographic proof to back up all their fishing stories:

Rainbow Trout, Beaver Creek, VA 4/26/2012

Actually, they might be on to something with this photographic proof.   This Housewife thinks she should start documenting the housework and chores she does on a daily basis, disproving the notion that she's been laying on the sofa eating bon-bons, ala Peg Bundy. 

Over Exposure

I have this little side-business (actually, not much of a business since I lose more money on it than I earn).  I have a shop on Etsy.com where I sell hand-crafted Catholic rosary bracelets.  I've been dabbling in this for several years with almost modest success and it truly is more a labor of love than an actual money-making enterprise.

As with generally all online shops, the mantra on Etsy.com, is "have excellent photos of what you are selling".  Of course, unlike the brick-and-mortar shops, customers can't touch, feel and smell(?) your products so your pictures must tell the story.  Up until now, I have to be honest, my online pictures were amateurish, at best.  One enterprising fellow Etsy-er contacted me recently to offer photography services, at a cost.   The idea being better pictures will lead to more business.  Nice idea but a shop in the red can't really outsource the photos.

Despite my sad listing pictures, the Holy Spirit moved someone out there in cyber space and  late last week as I was feeling pretty low due to a job loss, an order came in through my Etsy shop.   

So, as I was getting ready to ship my latest creation this afternoon, I decided to break out my beat-up Canon digi-cam with the broken zoom feature and give new pictures the old college try.  For the first time ever, I played with adjusting the exposure, used a small tri-pod that one of my kids had been using as a Lego accessory, and actually tried out the 2 second delay.   I added extra spot light on the scene with an old desk lamp and tried to pay attention to where the camera auto-focused when it snapped the pic.

Here's the sub-amateur "before" photo:

BEFORE

And here's my effort from today:

AFTER

Well, at this size, you are going to just have to take my word for it.  Blown up to 1000pix wide, the AFTER photo is much better:  clear, detailed and true-to-life colors.    

I'm still pretty ignorant when it comes to photography but I feel happy that I took a step in a new direction today and tried something new, not solely relying on the AUTO features on my sad little battered camera. 

Now that the pictures in my listing are no longer over exposed, perhaps I'll get more exposure among potential customers....or at least not offend the artistic sensibilities of those who are surfing by!

Spring Cleaning, Part 2

Continuing my brutal take-no-prisoners purge during spring cleaning 2012, which was spurred by the passing of my FIL late last year...

This morning the pantry was my target.  As usual, I found a good many items that were long past their "use by" date.  How annoying is that?  $ down the drain.   And, you know if canned and bottled goods have expired, they've been in the pantry waaaay too long.  I really need to take a good look in there more often.  

As I was cleaning and purging, I came across multiple dusty liquor bottles in the pantry.  We're talking hootch in quantities that any respectable Mad Men era household would keep on hand but quantities unheard of in most of today's suburban homes.  You know the "don't drink and drive" and "just say no" messages from the Reagan years didn't totally fall on deaf ears. 

What's the source of all this booze in my house?  It was my late FIL who came from that Mad Men generation.  He was a regular drinker (his favorite drink was a Manhattan) and up until 2007, would spend gas traveling from Fredericksburg, VA, to Washington, DC, to stock up on his favorite booze.   Why the trip into DC?  He was convinced it was cheaper.  Never mind that pesky cost of gas.  

When my mother-in-law became ill in 2007 and we had to move my in-laws closer to us, we had the task of moving them.  The booze collection was just one of many treasures found amid the layers of paper, junk and worthless collectibles they seemed so fond of surrounding themselves with in their retirement years.  Happily the vast majority of the booze and the useless collectibles ended up with us.  My brothers-in-law had far to travel and, more importantly, knew when to say "no" to bringing things in to clutter up their own homes. Smart guys.

Back to this morning.:  cleaning out the pantry and landing upon the forgotten collection of booze.  As I dusted off the bottles my first thought was we could have a great party with all that if only we had a group of friends who lived close enough to stumble home -- no drinking and driving for this generation, remember.  My second thought was I'd better find a hiding spot for it and put it under lock & key.  With a teenager in the house, I suspect it would only be a matter of time before curiosity won out over "Just Say No".

So now I sit here, taking a break from cleaning and pondering the fate of the booze collection in my pantry.  Why not just pour it down the drain?   Well, there's no "use by" date on liquor and that would be like throwing $ away...wouldn't it?  Throwing $ away!?  Why do I count this stuff as part of our inheritance from my husband's family?  I guess it's the eternal siren call of having an impressive booze collection whether it is in style or not.

Spring Cleaning

So, as any good housewife should, I've been spring cleaning since the Christmas trees (yes trees...we had 5 of various sizes & type) came down in mid-January.   This had not been your normal run-of-the-mill yearly cleaning.   This has been one of those once-a-decade events where the purging of excess stuff gets brutal.  I'm not sure why I got the bug this year but I was starting to feel a bit claustrophobic in my 2700+ square foot home.  In the land of McMansions that is Loudoun County, my abode may seem humble to some but I contend that my modest family of four, plus pets, can't out-grow this home.  

Perhaps my itchiness to mercilessly spring clean started when we experienced a death in the family last fall.  My father-in-law, a dear old man, passed away at the ripe old age of 85.  He grew up during the Great Depression and experienced the hardship and horrors of the Dust Bowl first-hand during his Nebraska child-hood.  Like any good product of  the Great Depresssion and rationing of the WWII years, he tended to hoard.   I'm not talking hoarding like the sad people profiled on reality TV, but rather the kind of hoarding that involves hours spent surrounded by file cabinets and office supplies.  The man's biggest hobby & joy in life was sitting in his office surrounded by his lifetime of papers, receipts, rubber bands, paperclips and a somewhat impressive coin collection.   

Of course, when you move on to bone city, you can't take it with you.  Inevitably the possessions you spent a lifetime collecting, sorting and hoarding become the albatross around someone's neck.  In this case, my house became the depository for everything that didn't make the trip with FIL to the great beyond.  And this brings me to my present day spring cleaning purge to end all purges...  [to be continued]

Free to Be...a Housewife

For the past six years I have been juggling.   Juggling motherhood, housewifery and the holy grail of vocations for someone in my situation:  a part-time work-from-home job.  You see, when the opportunity to work at home came calling out of the blue all those years ago, I felt like I'd hit the lottery.  Wasn't that what I was hoping for?  A part-time job to help with the family budget and give me a sense of purpose?  I didn't want to just be a housewife, did I?  

Last week, all my juggling, came up short when I lost my holy grail of a job on Friday.  Mistake #1:  believing that my boss had crossed over into the friend category.  Friends understand and support each other's day-to-day challenges, right?  Friends understand working mothers have to juggle, right?   Mistake #2:  letting that employer/friend see behind the curtain of Oz one too many times. 

As the days pass and I continue to sort through what happened in this parting-of-ways with my boss, I feel that there's less and less I could have done to prevent this from happening.   Business decisions get made. But what frosts me the most is that no matter how hard I worked for that person, collecting my kudos along the way, they ultimately used my motherhood against me so that they could justify the business decision to hire another person with a different skill set. Whoa. 

As the days pass, my anger and sadness are fizzling away.  A sense of relief and new purpose is trickling in.  If I really look underneath the surface, I have to admit I'd not been happy with that job and employer for quite some time -- indentured servitude comes to mind for a number of reasons.   What if I had been more honest with myself and brave enough to pull the plug before the boss.  What had been conditioned in me to keep at a job that at-times made me down-right miserable?   Why did I let my self-worth become damaged from working for someone who seemed to require mind-reading capabilities?  Why did I let that particular job be my sense of purpose?

As a 40-something, I'm learning to accept that my earning potential does not determine my value.  I'm thankful to be in a position where I can take my time and find the next job that is a better fit for me.  I'm seeing I now have time for those housewifey interests I want to explore.  I'm joyful to discover that conflict, drama and change can lead to good things.....in time new opportunities paid or unpaid.  I have more time to clean my house (I enjoy it, really) do the laundry, pack the lunches, cook the dinners, taxi the kids and appreciate those with whom I share my life.  More time to engage in hobbies that make me happy:  Gardening, jewelery making, genealogy, being keeper of the family history and photographs.

Perhaps that boss turned out to be a friend after all.  That person took away my source of income, for now, but in its place gave me the sweet gift of time to gleefully and unreservedly enjoy being a housewife.  No longer a juggler, I'm more a Cinderella who can now say "some day my prince-of-a-job will come" and I'm OK with that.