TGIF and backwards weekends

November 11, 2011 By 1 Comment

It’s Friday. TGIF time. Corporate drones are getting ready to kick back with margaritas, radio stations are queuing up “Bang the drum all day” for afternoon drive-time, and emails are getting signed with “have a great weekend!”

As for patently unemployable me, I’m battening down the hatches and planning survival strategies for the weekend.

I’ve long felt that I treat weekends and weekdays “backwards” from the way the rest of the world does it. Partly because I’m an introvert and HSP, partly because I run my own business, partly because I have kids.

Here’s what “backwards weekends” look like for me: My work time (weekdays while the kids are in school and the Professor is at his day job) is my creative time, my moneymaking time, my online-socializing time, my marketing time, MY time. I get to throw myself fully into my best work and my online world(s) while I have the house to myself. And I love it and need it.

Sure, sometimes I hate it too (when I’m overcommitted, or overwhelmed, or spinning my mental wheels…). But I get to create and work to my own rhythms (and in whatever clothes or lack thereof I feel like).

Then the kids come home and I want to be fully present for them, so MY time officially ends (even if I am still trying to finish stuff on my computer while they’re in the next room). And on the weekends, EVERYONE IS HOME ALL DAY. By Sunday evening, I am really really ready for everyone to be gone and leave me alone to do MY work again.

So sometimes I feel like a curmudgeon and a bad mother (long weekends, for example. And ohmygod it’s almost Christmas vacation and I’m frankly dreading it). But sometimes I don’t. And mostly it’s OK.

And then sometimes there are weeks like this one.

Monday night both kids were throwing up all night. Which meant the Professor and I were up too, soothing children and putting extra loads of laundry in.

Tuesday they stayed home from school and I spent the day monitoring input and output of a non-HTML variety, finishing up the extra laundry, and scrubbing the toilets. Brief escapes to Twitter and a generous post-shower slather of Aardvark Essentials Second Wind potion kept me sane.

Wednesday they went back to school, which was a relief because I was prepping for a Really Important Meeting and collecting beta-tester feedback for my next product (if your ears just pricked up, you may want to sign up for my Invitation List). But halfway through the day, the school called to tell me my son had broken out in hives, so I rushed to pick him up, get him home and into a baking-soda bath and dosed with Benadryl. I still don’t know what caused it (he’s never been allergic to anything as far as I can tell).

Thursday, shortly after they went to school, it became painfully clear that I was getting sick, so I dosed myself up with acetominophen and bismuth, took a nap, and was completely useless for the entire rest of the day, feebly sipping my Sprite and gingerly chewing my crackers.

And today, Friday, TGIF to the rest of the world, is a National Holiday. Both of my now-perfectly healthy kids are lounging around reading and playing computer games while I write this. I’m hoping I won’t get any sicker before I get weller, and oh joy, I just discovered the toilet in the hall bathroom is leaking.

So, yeah. This weekend is going to be one of the hard ones.

Would I rather be a corporate drone, though, looking forward to a work-free weekend? Don’t make me laugh too hard, please. If I had a “regular job,” I would have had to take at least two and a half days off this week, a week that only had four workdays to begin with. So I’d be just as behind, down three sick days, and hoping I’m not about to be downsized.

Nope, I’ll take the life I’ve chosen, backwards weekends and all. I’m allowed to be grumpy about it sometimes, because most of the time I love it to pieces.

What about you? If you’re running your own business (and that definitely includes part-time freelancing and other side-hustles), how do you treat your workdays and weekends?

Image by pvera on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License

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Help save my diabetic cat and send my kids to college!

September 21, 2009 By

Hi, everybody.

I just liquidated my kids’ college savings accounts to pay for treatment for my diabetic cat.

RockyintheDryer

Figure 1: Rocky the Diabetic Cat (he's relaxing in a cozy warm heap of newly-dried laundry...in the dryer. I didn't say he was smart, just diabetic.

Of my two cats, Rocky is my least favorite. He’s kinda thick-headed and has never learned that he’s not allowed to jump on the table. He doesn’t sit on my lap and purr like Jackson, the “good” cat. He’s got an unnatural lust for appliances (as shown in Figure 1. He also likes to climb into the dishwasher when it’s warm and dry. I told you it was unnatural!).

But those are not good enough reasons for me to just let him starve to death because he can’t metabolize his food properly.

I may have made lots of dumb mistakes in my life, but I am not a cat murderer. Sheesh.

This is one of those scenarios that is so crazy that I couldn’t possibly have made it up. It sounds like a classic sob-story scam, even to me (I’m laughing, thinking about all the spam emails I’ve gotten featuring poor orphans and the like).

But every word is true.

So I invite you to laugh along with me, at least until I get to the part where I shamelessly flog this sob-story so that you’ll buy my stuff*.

(*Oh wait, I’m already doing it. Flog flog flog!)

September: Budget crisis as usual

September was already shaping up to be a lean month, finance-wise, here at Casa del Cholbi (yeah, we sometimes do call it that, after a margarita or two). Now, I’ve had plenty of months where the last week or 10 days is a don’t-use-the-debit-card zone, and the family bank account is down to chump change until The Professor’s paycheck arrives on the first day of the next month. But September was looking like it would be worse than the “normal finanancial crisis” scenario.

(Do I see a pattern here? Yes, thank you Dance of Shiva, I do indeed. And the unraveling of it includes writing this post.)

But I still felt optimistic. If not for September, then for October.

Just when things were going so well!

Possibly because of delusion and denial, sure. But also possibly because, for the first time in eight years, I now have time to work on my business at something approaching full capacity. Because both of my Genius Children are now old enough to be in school, full-time. For free.

And I am having so much fun creating and planning and internetworking with fabulous people. I’ve created two new service packages (WordPress Installation and AWeber Tune-Up, $39 each), planned a wacky teleclass called The Gentle Art of Making Money with your WordPress Blog in partnership with my new pal Meredith Curtin, introduced my Web Coach Open Office Hours, started revamping my personal/business Cholbi.com website, gotten more active on Twitter (sorry Facebook and LinkedIn, maybe later), and lots more. Trust me, you’ll be hearing more about these New and Exciting Products and Services here on the blog.

Lots of thinking and planning and also lots of doing. Truly inspired doing.

So, even if we squeaked through September by the proverbial skin of our teeth, October was bound to be better. Bound to be!

But then stuff started happening.

The plot thickens!

  • The Professor is taking a mandatory 9.23% pay cut, because he’s an employee of the Great State of California, which is, apparently, having a bit of a budget crisis of its own.
  • We had to have a huge amount of weed-abatement done. This is mandatory every fire season, and it’s a good thing (trust me, I’ve experienced California’s fire season up-close and personal, but that’s another post). It was, however, more expensive than I’d planned for. Much, much more.
  • My therapist’s office called and surprise! I owe them for several visits, because they “misunderestimated” the number of sessions my insurance company would cover.
  • Rocky, our younger (and frankly, stupider) cat, was diagnosed with diabetes. My cat, unlike myself and my children, does not have health insurance. So far, his diagnosis and treatment has cost about $600.
ChristmasCats

Figure 2: Help my kitty see another Christmas!

So. Several unexpected (or underbudgeted) expenses, one lower-than-expected paycheck, and all maxed-out credit cards later, I turned to our only remaining savings: The kids’ college funds.

I’m frantically rationalizing to myself: “There’s lots of time left until they’re college-bound. Surely we can make it up. Also, they’re geniuses, so they’ll get scholarships, right? And maybe they’ll become Internet millionaires out of high school and won’t want to go to college in the first place!”

Still, it was a hard thing to do. And there aren’t any more savings to draw from. No offshore tax shelters (at least, not yet, bwa-ha-ha!). And looming debt. Did I mention the debt? No? Well, trust me, it’s looming.

This looks like a good spot for a subheading, but I can’t think of anything witty

I could easily get freaked out about all of this. And I do, from time to time. I’d like to say that I’m being all positive-minded and confident and trusting-the-universe about it…and sometimes that’s true, but not always. Not by a long shot.

Mostly I just do what I need to do, right now. I try my best (and sometimes my best just isn’t good enough) to focus on the one thing I really really want to do in this moment. Whether that’s writing a blog post, tweeting about my upcoming class, giving Rocky his insulin shot (it’s much easier than it sounds — he doesn’t even feel it), installing WordPress for someone, figuring out how much I can actually spend on groceries this week, or reading a mystery novel to escape it all for awhile (most recently, I really enjoyed Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — a real page-turner. And yes, that’s a shameless Amazon affiliate link).

I remember that I am not a cat murderer. And that lots of regular people who haven’t done anything wrong are also facing financial problems, and that I can still be proud of my business ideas even if they fail, because I am working and learning and experimenting and being the real me.

Thanks for reading.

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Happy Independence Day!

July 3, 2009 By

Tomorrow is the day that we Americans traditionally celebrate our independence by setting off explosives and drinking too much beer.

I prefer a kinder, gentler celebration, myself. I also like to think about the many meanings of “independence” and how they’re showing up in my life. July 4 is a nice sort-of-halfway point between the hoopla of New Year’s resolutions and the end-of-year taking-stock that can happen on Thanksgiving. So with 2009 half-over, here are my reflections on independence.

Independence as growing up

For instance, as children grow, they are supposed to develop a healthy independence from their parents. I see it in my own children.

(I’m not talking about them getting their own apartments quite yet — they’re still in elementary school! But every little step, like my son’s first sleepover and my daughter’s first Girl Scout meeting, is both a joy and a miniature heartbreak. Parents, you know what I’m talking about.)

I see it even in families with adult children (I’m at a family reunion this holiday weekend, reconnecting with people I haven’t seen in awhile, watching how families grow and change, mostly for the better).

The key word is healthy. Healthy independence is possible even in close-knit, loving families, of course. It doesn’t have to involve rejection or renunciation. But sometimes those things happen anyway. And then in the dance of family drama, sometimes the breach is healed, and sometimes not. A generous dose of time sometimes helps.

The push and pull between the families we’re born into (our parents, siblings, cousins, etc.) and the families we choose (lovers, spouses, children, close friends) can bring out the best and worst in us. My challenge is to let it bring out the best while remaining conscious and intentional. I guess that’s a challenge for all of us, actually.

Independence from worry

That leads to the subject of emotional health in general. For me, this whole year has been a journey to independence of an emotional and psychological kind. Which, paradoxically, has involved a greater reliance on friends, family, colleagues, and others for certain kinds of healthy support. There’s that word again. Hmm.

And there’s been a lot of questioning on my part about what I deserve. Do I deserve success? Do I deserve sadness? Do I deserve to be treated in certain ways or not in other ways? And I think I’m getting ready to be tired of that talk.

Know why? I do not want to live in a world where everyone gets what they deserve. In that world, there would be no unfair advantages or cheating to get ahead, but there would also be no such things as forgiveness and generosity.

So my challenge here is to stop thinking I do or don’t deserve something, and start thinking about what I really want, and what I’m willing to do to get it. Want to join me? Leave a comment here and let’s start a discussion.

Independence from The Man

But the third kind of independence is the one that actually looms largest for me this year, and I know it’s important for many of you too. I’m talking about financial independence, starting with independence from having to have a job.

I was asked recently if my son’s entry into kindergarten this fall (see parental joy and heartbreak, above) would free me up to finally get a real job, and I was frankly horrified.

The idea of spending any amount of time, let alone eight hours a day, in service to someone else’s goals, with no ability to make more money than my employer deems appropriate, and no job security? Laughable.

I fully realize that writing that sentence, in public view on the internet, makes me unemployable. And I say, bring it on. I positively relish being unemployable. Because honestly? I suck at being an employee. The views I just expressed have come from eight years of not having a day job, and growing into the idea that I’m a real, live business owner. And I think it would be really difficult (impossible, really) to un-grow that perspective. To stop wondering, “Is there a better way to do this?” and go back to “How do I fill my time until 5pm?” That sounds like death to me.

Which means I’ll embrace my independence from the complacency and false security of “having a real job” until I’m down to my last nickel.

Naomi Dunford is changing the world by helping 1000 people quit their jobs this year. I don’t qualify because I don’t have a job to quit, but I’d sure love to help her with that goal by pointing . If you like the idea of quitting your job, you may want to read the article she wrote last fall called Why We’re Broke and How to Fix It, which is a clarion call to declaring independence from the soul-sucking corporate machine.

Happy Independence Day, America. Happy Independence, my fellow small-business owners. May you get not what you deserve but what you truly want.
–Wendy Cholbi, your friendly neighborhood swim-goggle-wearing technology-to-English translator

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Disguised Learning, or Real-Life Business Tree Roots

February 6, 2009 By

So I asked my 7-year-old daughter (previously featured in this post for her genius problem-solving ability) what she did in school today. Along with her science project, math, reading, and recess, she said she did something called “disguised learning.” It went something like this, and I swear I didn’t make any of this up:

Me: What’s disguised learning?

Genius Daughter: It’s when we’re doing something that we think is fun but we’re really learning something.

Me: Like what?

GD: Like building with k’nex. Kids think they’re playing but they’re also learning about building geomectrical forms, and shapes, and how to connect things, and science stuff.

Me: Oh. So what’s the difference between disguised learning and regular learning?

GD: Well, some kids think disguised learning is, you know, funner.

Me: But doesn’t it kind of defeat the purpose of disguised learning to call it disguised learning? I mean, if you know you’re supposed to be learning, it’s not really disguised, is it?

GD: Well, it’s still funner.

Disguised learning. What a hoot. The things they’re teaching kids these days (and my internal grammarian is sniping, they can’t teach her to say more fun?). I had to laugh.

And then I cried. You know why? Because I’ve just been through about two months of “disguised learning” in my personal life, and let me tell you, it’s not funner.

Even though I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve thought (or heard from friends, or read in a supportive email) that this is actually a learning experience and a growth opportunity. Yeah, I know that, in my head. Which seems to be functioning reasonably well. My heart, not so much.

Let’s see, how to segue to a business lesson in a non-cheesy way? I don’t know. So I hope you like cheese.

So here’s the part that’s related to business:

All of it.

Because for a sole proprietor (or solopreneur, or work-at-home mom, or any of several other names for a one-person business), our lives and our businesses just aren’t separable. Some people are better at compartmentalizing than others, of course. I’m not one of them. It’s all connected, baby.

That’s what the metaphor of the small business tree is all about. Your unique tree is an organic, living thing that grows and changes. And it grows from roots that are inextricable from your personal life, family, friends, and all the rest.

I mentioned in my roots post that my children are some of my most important roots, for example. I have a strong desire to integrate my business and family life so that I am not absent from their lives while I am working. And I want them to remember, when they grow up, that they had a mom who didn’t have an ordinary job — she created an extraordinary business and had fun with it. That’s my hope, and that hope is a strong root of my business tree (even though it’s a root that points at the future).

I have lots of other roots, of course. My business partner, my office, my sexy black MacBook, my idea of who my Right People are, my genuine joy when I help someone to become empowered with technology. All that and more. Much, much more.

But sometimes a root gets chopped off. Something that was a strong sustaining force changes, or disappears. This happens all the time, in small ways. Clients come and go, or the economy takes a hit, or your computer crashes and your hard drive is hosed. Bigger things might be a loved one losing a job, or dying, or getting in a car accident. You get the idea.

When a big, important root is lost suddenly, it feels like the tree is unbalanced, about to topple. How can my tree possibly survive without this root? This is the question that has come up for me, personally, recently. And since we all know by now that business and life are the same thing, what I’m really asking is How can I possibly survive without this root?

Which leads to the next question: Who am I without it?

And I remembered a recent post from Havi in which she mentioned “the deep, complicated, loving, challenging relationship that I have with myself. And the commitments I make to myself to keep getting better at learning how to give myself love, and stuff like that.”

That sentence took my breath away. Because she is talking about discovering and then consciously nurturing her own roots. And she said it in a way that I could hear. And it clicked for me, even though I’ve said in past posts that you can choose to grow the roots you want. I couldn’t hear my own advice until it came to me in different words.

So I get to grow new roots, consciously. I get to decide who I am, and by extension what I want my business to look like. And yes, that’s complicated and challenging, but it’s also deep and loving. And learning how to give myself love is a root that no one can ever chop out from under me.

A chopped-out root can’t just be replaced. The tree will always bear a scar. But healthy trees can survive a lot. I recently visited a redwood grove and saw 300-foot-tall trees that were nearly 2,000 years old. Several of them were completely hollowed out at the base (I assumed by fire). You could literally walk inside these trees and be in a living cave. And they were still growing! Inspiring isn’t even the word. Hmm. There’s probably another whole post about redwoods in there somewhere. But that’s for another day. For now, I’m going to honor my commitment to self-care by getting some sleep, and looking forward to tomorrow.

How about you? What are your roots? What can you do to consciously nourish them today, right now?

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