The upside of the downside

Recently -- very recently - some very bad things happened in My Little World, things that are disconcerting, to put it mildly.

There's the Economy, of course. I know I'm not alone in that. For some reason I was blithely meandering along, thinking the shake up we had back in 2000-2001 was the Big One. Denial was not my middle name, but my first name, all the way through October when I suddenly realized, my finances were not good and I really should try to find outside work.

I was also in denial about my Age. Like many of my fellow Boomers, I didn't think my being.. um.. older.. was going to have any kind of negative effect on my marketability - I have all this knowledge, experience, wisdom - surely someone would appreciate it! Several months of job seeking have given me a fresh view.


Realizing that in today's Economy, those few jobs that are out there are going for the younger crowd, I realized I needed to work harder at my own Little Business. Now, I felt smug back in 2000 when I found a niche market - bookplates are a niche market, but my niche market within that niche market was small order bookplates.

Last year my main supplier, The Antioch Company (formerly Antioch Publishing, and before that, The Antioch Bookplate Company) was sold, and along with it my supplier of bookplates. Fortunately I have a good deal of bookplates in stock but I realized I needed to get more serious about the bookplates and sidelines I've been designing.

Except - the Economy. This April, one of my secondary sources of income decided to cut the commissions paid to the artists (or graphic designers, in my case) who provide the art sold on their lines - commission checks starting with next month's check will be about half of what they've been.

Yeeeee gads. I found a secondary source for selling my graphic designs, but it's slow work right now.

To add insult to injury, my oldest computer, the one where my fonts and old records were stored, decided it had had enough, and died on me, followed by my newer family computer, where I do a lot of my design work - the motherboard died. That all happened within a 10 day period and required some technical help to pull out some records and reload them onto the remaining computer, another work computer.

But that wasn't enough. After things were running again, the wireless router decided it had had enough, and went out. On a Friday. We were essentially down and out until the following Tuesday, when someone could make it round and set us up with a new one, though we had sporadic access and work did get done.

Because this is a slow season, this happened at the best possible time for me. But not for some of my customers, who found their orders taking longer than usual and me more frazzled than usual.

So, I'm now down from four computers to two - frightening in some ways, because I don't have the resources (because of the Economy) to buy a new computer if something happens to either of the remaining ones.

This also is the year my youngest gets his driver's license, and my car insurance rockets up again. I'm having to pick up his health insurance, and he's looking at the colleges he'd like to go to, and I just want to go lie down for awhile.

On the bright side, because everything fell apart, I ended up deciding to revamp my website as long as I was having to prepare a new site for my new POD supplier.

There's a silver lining, yes?