Happy new year. It’s still not to late to say that, is it? It’s still January afterall. Unlike Halloween which starts in August and Thanksgiving in Sept and Xmas in October! We can stretch out the new year till at least mid-February, I would think.

I hope you had a happy holiday and had some fun with friends or your family or your pet. I had a good time and I went to a really fun new year’s party at a friend’s house who lives within walking distance of me so I could drink and not drive.

At first I was planning on coming back right away but the more time passed, the more I started to wonder about whether or not I should come back. I started thinking about how this blog will probably never make any money for me. At least that’s the message I recently received in my inbox and I believe it. Plus, this was and is a time-consuming way to spend my day; is it worth all that effort and not get a cent for it? I didn’t think it was, so then I had to ask myself, why should I continue? I couldn’t think of anything new to write about. I didn’t want to take my camera out with me anymore but I always did anyway.

I love taking pictures because I love looking at the world through a frame. It makes everything have more sense to me and I see more when I look at the world that way but then, along came the problem of where am I going to store all these pictures I’ve been taking? Dropbox was telling me it’s full and if I want more space, I have to pay $10/mo. I didn’t want to do that  so, I came up with a solution.

I hooked up my old mac which is connected to an external hard drive and passed my personal pics to the mac that dropped them into the external drive. Now I have a bit more room to store stuff and missed all of you (11 was my most visited day so far). I want to share with you the pictures I’ve taken and tell you about the work I’m doing and maybe I’ll even bore you a little with an update on my current screenplay. So I’m back. I don’t know for sure if I’ll ever make any money writing this blog but I’m still going to do it. I may take off again sometime and I’m not going to try and do it everyday but once a week for sure.

Now, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to share with you some recent discoveries:

I wonder if humming birds ever show up and move into these warm houses. They’re so simple and surprising. I can’t tell if they’re practical or decorative but I like them either way.

One of the many great things about living in San Francisco is the sense of community I find here, even if I’m walking alone downtown at night, I see City Hall, all dressed up in 49er colors (in real life it is, my camera has a bit of Andy Warhol in it). The same thing happened when the Giants were making it big. The whole City turned orange and black. The team colors makes me feel like we’re all in this together. The Giants triumph is the City’s triumph and my triumph because I live here and the Giants and 49ers are my team. It doesn’t matter if I’m not really into football, they’re still my team and I’m proud of them and I love City Hall for turning on my teams’ colors.

I still have a thing for telephone poles. I think its almost an obsession that has something to do with me trying to hold on to the past even though I embrace change, fearlessly embrace it, I want to hold on to this pole and never let it go. I fear one day the winds of change will blow away everything I grew up seeing which makes me feel a little scared. Or, maybe I just like the way they look and the fact that my dad did a watercolor of the telephone pole in our backyard when I was a kid. I wish I were more of a fearless computer programming so maybe I could figure out how WordPress works so I wouldn’t feel so mystified when it comes to placing my pictures  and how my text.

One good thing that happened to me already this new year is I started another business, sort of. It really isn’t new its just that I’m suddenly getting paid to do what I used to offer for free. It being space arrangement, which sounds kind of funny. I was calling it, room arrangement but I never really liked the way that sounded so I’m testing out other possibilities like, space arrangement or furniture placement, furniture placer, which is a little bit hard to say. The name of a business should roll off the tongue so you want to say it.

I used to offer my service as gift certificates to help raise money for my kids’ preschool. What surprised me was the fact that my certificates always sold out and then I’d go to their house and try to spin up some magic. To my surprise and amazement, I did and everyone was happy with the results. I stopped offering the gift certificates because I wanted to get paid so my business died which was okay since I never got paid (you can see money is fore front in my mind lately and I hate it but I can’t help it. I tell my kids its a real drag to be broke because all you ever think about is the money you don’t have to pay for things like property tax and cavities).

Then, I found a website called Thumbtack.com that offered all kinds of services from people with all kinds of skills so I signed up as an Interior Designer and Color Specialist. Something I never could have done if it weren’t for writing this blog. I realized that writing about something I really like and am interested in, has given me better, stronger sense of myself and a sharper vision or opinion of my likes and dislikes. I came to the realization that that’s what all interior designers do; they give you their ideas and opinions on how they think your things ought to look. And if you like their vision, you hire them and let them do their magic on your house. If you don’t like their vision, you hire someone else and see if their ideas fit. I figured it was time I throw my hat into the ring by offering my expertise in helping my clients figure out what they like, in case they don’t know, and help them create the kinds of rooms and arrangements they do want.

The wonderful client I’m currently working with has presented a new challenge to me. She and her husband recently moved into a new home in the City with plenty of beautiful furniture that doesn’t quite fit their current needs. What’s new about this is my client has to hire a moving company to do all the heavy lifting. Which is great because she and I and her husband could never do it. Which brings up a old thought of mine, before I bought my own house and inherited all of my husband’s parents’ furniture, I always imagined how great it would be to only own the kind of furniture that I could move myself, like lawn furniture. Really comfortable stuff that you could fold up and easily move somewhere else if I wanted to.

My house if full of really heavy stuff that doesn’t fold and neither does my client’s furniture. So what I’m really leading up to is this, I’m moving this blog into a new direction; I’m going to add on a new wing to it that faces south and east and in that wing I’m going to write about my new business, the challenges I face and my solutions. If you didn’t notice, I’m creating a real niche for myself! A notion that has been as slippery to me as a wet stone in my path.

I will also be uploading pictures that are my portfolio as well as reviews of my work on Thumbtack.com. I’ve also created a page for my writing skills. So if you like the way I stick two words together, you can hire me and I’ll create content for your website, or a script perhaps. I just wrote one for another new client who wanted a script for a video introducing a new product for funding on Kickstarter. I have a lot of experience writing scripts and they’re easy for me to write. Okay, enough touting myself, gee whiz, give it a break, will ya?

I’ve also decided that I’m not going to write about my script because this blog really doesn’t seem like the right place for that kind of post. If you disagree, let me know.

I want to do a last shout-out to the 4 readers who kept the torch lit waiting for my return. Thank you. It’s nice to be wanted.

Regards from your design detective,

Karen