12. and bust again

Alix over at Casa Hice asked me this after one of my more recent posts on this thread and I’ve decided to answer it here:  Do you love what you do? Or do the deadlines and demands stress you out?...I’d have to say that mostly I love what I do.  Although there were several years in there (as described in this post and the previous installment) that I pretty much hated it.  It was nothing BUT stress during those years.  Now, though, now I do love it.  I love to make things, to work with my hands, to have an idea and construct it.  Mostly I am happy with the result, sometimes all I see are the flaws and sometimes I amaze even myself.  But it’s not usually the end result that I work for.  It’s the process.  That said, it can get stressful when I have more work than I can do and make everybody happy about how long it takes them to get their job.  It is also stressful when we don’t have enough work...will a job come in before our meager savings run out?  When I was younger and we didn’t have any work, I would make cold calls to designers and architects to sell ourselves.  I really hated that and eventually quit doing it.  If things got desperate, then I’d just go out and get a job.  Haven’t ever had to do that yet but there was a year or two when I actually applied for a job.  Funny thing though, when you have been self employed doing something so specialized for as long as we have, you basically become unemployable unless, of course, you want to work at Walmart or a fast food joint.

My friend John Kurman’s recent post on Random Walks is sort of about this same thing...fun/not fun.  While working this past week, spending the last four days laminating about 550 jewels (of which a little less than half had already had dicroic glass glued to it and ground smooth) to the window behind the altar of a chapel we had lots of visitors pop in when they would notice us working.  At one point during the week, a lady came in and asked me if it was fun.  Fun?!  Lady, this is work, I'm up on a friggin' 12' ladder!  But now that it's done?  Yeah, it was fun.  Well, maybe not fun exactly, as Reya said (see comments below) satisfying.

so, continuing (and as usual, if you are new here or haven’t yet read the whole story, click here and read from the bottom up)...

By 1992 (our kids were 15 and 13 by then), the bottom was falling out of our lives.  Our first employee, the one who had taken over all the actual sandblasting, and Marc never did really get along and the tension between them became worse and worse over the years until he finally quit in the middle of a big job, 5 floors of an interior wall system that surrounded the central elevator shafts.  And on top of that the stress was doing both of us in.  One day I found myself yelling at one of the local designers who had come by to talk about a job we had done for her that had a small problem.  Marc and I were constantly at each other’s throats, were on the verge (maybe even over the line a little bit) of the three ‘Ds’...drink, drugs and divorce.  We were taking weekends away from each other (this is when I started the river guide gig). As soon as we finished that last big job with the help of a friendly competitor, we basically quit.  We let our other two employees go and took a year off while we repaired our lives.  That year turned into nearly two before we were finally able to go back to work in earnest.  Every penny we had left from the big money days, we spent those two years and in the ensuing years while we started our business back up.