More delays
I can’t believe my last post was four months ago… sigh. I didn’t mention it then, but so much happened to delay progress. Feels so hard to make any headway. And I’ve been at this for 3 years now!
So what happened? After a 3 week vacation in August 2016, we discovered that my husband, a very fit and athletic young man, had to have heart surgery. I was out of my day job for another 3 weeks to be primary caregiver to the kids, as he had to limit his movement during recovery. It took 2 and a half more months before he could get back to his normal routine, and I tried to help out more around the house during this time while catching up with the 6-week day job backlog. Him being a very active and independent person, he hated not being able to continue doing things like renovate our basement, heh. But during this time I shoveled several meters of snow, changed tires, lifted tires (on rims!) into the shed, and took down a trampoline all by myself. It was kind of nice doing the physically demanding tasks that I normally wouldn’t, but it took time. Then, just as we thought life could go back to normal, he had a complication and had to limit movement again for three months, although not nearly as much as the first time. We just got in the clear last week.
I’ve managed to negotiate Tuesdays and Thursdays off again this year (for March-June), which was supposed to follow a 3-week vacation in February. We had big plans for that vacation – clear out the basement, finish renovations, make the home office more inviting – but I came down with a nasty cold with incessant coughing, and was just fried. Then just as I was on the tail end of that, I fell while hiking and fractured the iliac crest of my pelvis, making things like bending and lifting impossible. Today I’m just starting to be able to do up my own shoes using some creative (and non-standard) maneuvers involving long laces. So here we are, renovations still outstanding, and already nearing the end of March. And I’m still doing a teaching job on the side to pay for it all, which is, of course, sucking all of my time. Sigh.
Usually I try to be positive in my posts, but it’s been a long, hard slog just to get through life these past few months, and business progress hasn’t been a crawl, it’s been 0 km/h. I just finished my taxes and this is the second year of claming expenses but no income, and I don’t want the CRA to think I’m not trying to make this profitable… after three years of taking time off from the day job to get this launched! I’ve told myself that I have to put a product out this year to make this a viable business. As a family, we’ve invested a lot into it, not only in terms of time off from work to develop it, but also in resources, courses, software, web hosting, domain registration, market research, etc. We have to make it work this year.
This means I have to treat my writing time as non-negotiable time, just like my day job; it simply has to get done.
My hope if that a year from now, I’ll look back at this time, which I think has been the most difficult time in this 3-year journey, and I’ll think to myself: that was when I finally decided to take this side business into full gear.