Because I can

This video from last night was after the heavy downpour and before the temperature plummeted.  And it also made me think of the evening prior when I was out on the front porch, likely working on my fish chime (which sold as soon as I put it on Etsy!) and I hear the neighbor guy yelling "get out of here".  I replied, not loud enough for him to hear me, I don't think, "you talking to me?", laughed at myself and repeated it, sometimes twice, each time he yelled.  I crack myself up.  Like just now, with a spelling error and I tried to separate 2 words I had not spaced and kept hitting the delete key instead of the backspace key.  Saying " just stop that" to no one in particular but me and laughing some more.  What can I say, I amuse me.

And also as I realized that my lines are not aligned to the left but doing their own thing and I could not seem to fix it.  Being strange like my bad self :-)

I spent the majority of the day getting my Etsy shop up and running and once I figure out how to get the link over here, I will put it in a post.  Oddly when I am on my page there is no URL in the address bar, just etsy.com, which is frustrating and the downside of a tablet apparently.  Or maybe it's just an Etsy thing, I do not know.  And right at this very moment, I do not care.  It's cold out here.

I did finally get out for a short while this afternoon to run to the post office for boxes as my chimes are starting to stack up out here on the porch. Plus, if they are already in boxes it will make it easier when I need to ship them out. It looked like rain then and I took this picture, where you could tell it was raining in the distance:

Then I jetted home to baton down the hatches should they need batoning down. I got in a bit before the rain and Rich (my brother) put the RV batteries out of harms way, thinking the same thing, before he took off for the gym.  He will be running the Bay to Breakers in San Francisco this weekend, for the 38th straight year, impressive at 77.  After he left I decided I was hungry and went in to warm up some salmon and clam chowder and contemplating going to the bathroom.  But no, I heard the dogs barking and it sounded far away, normally they are outside the kitchen door of the wrap around porch.  So I stuck my head out to look and one of them, freaked by the thunder, was making an escape.  So I brought them inside and my food was hot and the bathroom forgotten.

Back to building (or at least setting up to start) a new chime and was thinking about the fact that a hobby can be profitable.  I know my brother and his lady think it's wonderful that I enjoy doing this but they don't think it can be sustainable as an income.  Ok, maybe not to begin with but in the long term I think it can.  My needs are few.  And if one thinks a "hobby" cannot bring a decent income I want them to think of all the people who have a "profitable job" that they love doing.  It's about passion really.  Does anybody go to a job joyfully?  If they do, I would be willing to bet that they love what they are doing, have a passion for it.  The way I see it is that a job you love going to, look forward too even, is just a hobby that you are passionate about.  Granted, sometimes we have to go to work for an income and I only apply to places that I might enjoy working at and for but truly that is more for a social life, so I don't lose my skills to be social.  My passion is writing and creating, it is what I was born to do, what I love to do, but they are solitary endeavors and one needs social skills as well.

There is nothing quite like hearing CHA CHING from a sale of something you created with your own vision and hands.  And that was a joyful sound for me yesterday and somewhat vindicating.  I showed my brother the sale and explained that it took me close to an hour to get each chime listed on Etsy but after I put the second one up and before I even had the third one listed I had sold the second one already.  Not bad for a days work. And to know that people love what you create, enough to pay for it, is somehow unexplainable and it isn't validation, it's more that I can bring someone else a little joy with what I do.  I love that alot.  There is just something wonderful about bringing a vision to life and being the artistic, creative type, I am overjoyed when I finish anything I am working on and look at it and fully appreciate it for what it is.  With my writing, it isn't a tangible object I can see, but in a way it can be, looking at the pages of thoughts put down, conveyed.

Yeah, I didn't mean to go off on a tangent there but it happens, it's the way my brain works and I am okay with it.  It is my blog, my daily journal that I share publicly, being an open book and all and if it helps just one person then I feel great about that.  If it doesn't, I won't cry about it because it is, after all, more for my grandchildren and their children who one day will have their own, a legacy of sorts, lessons learned along the way of just flowing and accepting whatever is at every moment, and enjoying as much of it as you can.  And that it is perfectly fine to have whatever feelings you have at any time whie remembering your feelings are NOT who you ARE.  They are just part of the human experience.  I want them to know what made their Nana tick, so to speak.  One day they will appreciate that and think "wow, nana was an amazing woman, bold, to the point and knew what she was talking about".

Which makes me think of my son and something he said to me when he was young.  He asked how it felt to always know stuff and be right all of the time.  I told him it wasn't about being "right" but that I wasn't born old and wise.  They say a fool learns from his mistakes and a wise man learns from others' mistakes and that is me, a bit of both.  Sure I learned from my mistakes (and later learned that many of them were not mistakes at all, but only a perception of a mistake by another person) but I watched and listened and learned from other peoples mistakes, too.  I believe that since there is no instruction manual to live by (ok, the bible has a lot to teach us about how to live well) we make "mistakes" to learn how to do better or things not to do again.  Not really "mistakes"at all so mush as learning opportunitites.  Like teaching people that passion can equal dollars, but I digress, yet again.

I see that I have gone on for awhile here and my left hand is cramping so I will leave you here for today and hope you have a glorious, joyful day.

Be well and all my love.