I sometimes use this space to talk about my hypothetical beautiful life, wherein I live all my dreams and still have time to rock. In that vein, I'm going to make a confession now. In my beautiful life, a portion of my income comes from an Etsy store where I sell items that I have woven or otherwise crafted from yarn or thread. Like most aspects of my beautiful life, the Etsy store is fully plausible but thus far exists only in my head.
The other day, the Husband upped the Etsy store ante by showing me a wooden pin he had crafted and saying "If you do all the paperwork, I'll contribute to the store." This is awesome, obviously. The motivation of having spousal involvement means it might actually happen. The flip side, though, is that now I really do have to come up with a store name.
I have long felt that the worst part of most endeavors is naming them. Papers (in the days when I had to write them), screen names, dogs, blogs, blog posts: all require names, ideally clever ones that provide insight into their owner/creator's character. It took me forever to come up with a blog name that I was okay with. When I was talking about ending the blog hiatus, the Husband pointed out that I should change its name. "Misplaced" Hoosier implies that I might want to find my way back to Indiana eventually, which is demonstrably not the case. This may be true, but aside from the practical element of not wanting the URL to change, I also don't want to have to think of something new. Maybe if I learn a super cool nickname for Vermonters, I'll use that to create a new blog name, but until that point, "Misplaced Hoosier" I remain. (Also, part of the point of the name was that no matter where you encounter us, there is something distinctly Midwestern about us Midwesterners, and something even more distinctive about those of us from the Great Lakes region, but I digress.)
This, then, is the major obstacle of the Etsy store. It really needs to have a good name, because I'd be selling stuff. Something memorable, maybe clever, but not cutesy. Not something yarn specific, because the Husband will probably make things from wood and found objects. I know that not everyone thinks this hard about these things. There are people in this world who name their children after Twilight characters, for heaven's sake. But, since there is no way I'm going to be the proprietor of the Renesmee Emporium, I'm going to have to put some thought into it. Got any ideas?
Friday, March 30, 2012
Monday, March 5, 2012
Elation, Terror, and a Tiny Drop of Moose
I'm spending the days leading up to the move oscillating between elation and terror. The elation is usually easy to access. This, after all, is a move the Husband and I have been talking about in some form for years. At the beginning of our relationship, we'd say "Seattle" instead of "Vermont", but in either event, it's a big move away from the Midwest and toward mountains. And it's happening! For real!
The terror is sneaky, though, and it manifests in the oddest ways. Looking at the Spring Preview issue of Publisher's Weekly, I saw a book that looked good and went to the library catalog to see if it was on order. When I saw that it was coming out in May, there was the panic. In May, I may or may not live here. If there's anyone ahead of me on the request list, I may never read it. How can I put a book on hold when I don't even know where I'll be living? If I breathe deeply and focus on mountains and the existence of libraries in Vermont, I can usually get back to the elation.
Yesterday was a hard day though. For reasons to do with the condo (wait, have we talked about the condo? I try to avoid talking about it, because it makes me feel panicky on a normal day. Come over for drinks sometime and I'll tell you the story. Spoiler alert: it ends with a word that rhymes with "more closure", which is ironic, since that's exactly what it didn't bring. Also, if you come over for drinks, I'm probably still not going to want to talk about it.)
Anyway, back to the point. For reasons that are unpleasant to think about, our taxes aren't done yet, and I was thinking about that and feeling tense. Plus, I have a dentist appointment this week to fix a chipped onlay. (Never heard of an onlay? Welcome to my mouth, your visual dental dictionary.) Dentist appointments are painful and expensive and usually come in groups, so I was already feeling stressed out when our landlords dropped in.
I should explain about our landlords. They are people we were friends with before we moved into their house. They have moved to Chicago, but he is a professor who comes in town to teach once a week. The point being that they're cool and not landlord-y and that we see him a lot, but not the two of them together. The Husband had talked to him about the fact that we were moving but didn't know when, and he (the landlord) thought he knew of some people with similarly fuzzy plans who might be able to move in whenever we moved out.
Yesterday, though, they said that those plans had fallen through and that we were going to need to give them an end date. This is entirely reasonable and entirely expected. I told them what the Husband and I had agreed, which is that we don't have solid plans but that the goal is to be out by the end of May. If we're not ready by then and they do have a new tenant, then so be it. We'll figure something out. All of which is true, and all of which has been previously discussed by the Husband and me. But there was something about putting a date on it, especially on an already stressful day, that brought on the fear.
I suppose that a little fear is a small price to pay for a beautiful new life in Vermont, or at least a new life in beautiful Vermont. And I'm learning a sort of site-focused meditation technique in which I focus on the good things until my heart rate slows. You know what nearly always works? The fact that we're moving to a place where some of the highways have Moose Crossing signs. How bad can life be when you're less than an hour from the potential of seeing a moose?
The terror is sneaky, though, and it manifests in the oddest ways. Looking at the Spring Preview issue of Publisher's Weekly, I saw a book that looked good and went to the library catalog to see if it was on order. When I saw that it was coming out in May, there was the panic. In May, I may or may not live here. If there's anyone ahead of me on the request list, I may never read it. How can I put a book on hold when I don't even know where I'll be living? If I breathe deeply and focus on mountains and the existence of libraries in Vermont, I can usually get back to the elation.
Yesterday was a hard day though. For reasons to do with the condo (wait, have we talked about the condo? I try to avoid talking about it, because it makes me feel panicky on a normal day. Come over for drinks sometime and I'll tell you the story. Spoiler alert: it ends with a word that rhymes with "more closure", which is ironic, since that's exactly what it didn't bring. Also, if you come over for drinks, I'm probably still not going to want to talk about it.)
Anyway, back to the point. For reasons that are unpleasant to think about, our taxes aren't done yet, and I was thinking about that and feeling tense. Plus, I have a dentist appointment this week to fix a chipped onlay. (Never heard of an onlay? Welcome to my mouth, your visual dental dictionary.) Dentist appointments are painful and expensive and usually come in groups, so I was already feeling stressed out when our landlords dropped in.
I should explain about our landlords. They are people we were friends with before we moved into their house. They have moved to Chicago, but he is a professor who comes in town to teach once a week. The point being that they're cool and not landlord-y and that we see him a lot, but not the two of them together. The Husband had talked to him about the fact that we were moving but didn't know when, and he (the landlord) thought he knew of some people with similarly fuzzy plans who might be able to move in whenever we moved out.
Yesterday, though, they said that those plans had fallen through and that we were going to need to give them an end date. This is entirely reasonable and entirely expected. I told them what the Husband and I had agreed, which is that we don't have solid plans but that the goal is to be out by the end of May. If we're not ready by then and they do have a new tenant, then so be it. We'll figure something out. All of which is true, and all of which has been previously discussed by the Husband and me. But there was something about putting a date on it, especially on an already stressful day, that brought on the fear.
I suppose that a little fear is a small price to pay for a beautiful new life in Vermont, or at least a new life in beautiful Vermont. And I'm learning a sort of site-focused meditation technique in which I focus on the good things until my heart rate slows. You know what nearly always works? The fact that we're moving to a place where some of the highways have Moose Crossing signs. How bad can life be when you're less than an hour from the potential of seeing a moose?
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