Latest Crafting

Last night I decided to finally sit down & fix up my rickety $4 thrift store shelf. It was a lot of work & turned into an ever evolving project. Of course, I took pictures of the transformation, & I'm completely satisfied with the final outcome.

This is what the shelf looked like at first.


First plan with the individual shelves... orange spray paint...


Then... plan B with the shelves... Red Acrylic...


The body of the shelf got a glossy brown.


The shelf was missing a backing, so I cut some cardboard from an old poster frame to fit & painted it bright red.


Moving on to attach the backing to the shelf... I used my staple gun for the first time :D I totally didn't know that it took so much strength to fire that thing...


All put together & waiting for the shelves :)


Clearly, I gave up on the orange & then red shelves... I painted over the red with the same brown as the body of the shelf.


The finished shelf full of half of my mug collection :D It came out quite nicely, if I do say so myself.

Ta-da!

In the beauty salon...

i love the happy banter heard in the hair salon. an ever changing grouping of women, chatting about children, music, love lives, or something seen on tv. the regulars have become friends & begin excited greetings as their foot crosses the shop threshold.

To pay the bills...

what do you do when all the self-talk & deliberate thinking is not enough to create a positive atmosphere? what if nothing you can possibly do can make a situation more favorable? what if the unfavorable outcome is the only one visible?

i've been thinking things like this over the last few weeks... i suppose the last time i wrote on here was just before my promotion at work. before i became WAY to busy with the job to create time to write blog entries. but i still kept my mind on happiness. i made sure to smile & laugh & find the positive in each day despite the fact that no one else around me was. my work environment was & is a place where people drag themselves. where we only go because it pays our bills. I became quite aware of this early on after my change from a customer service representative to a team lead. In a moment my entire work world shifted from my 2x2 desk & phone to the whole floor. The individual customer on the phone was no longer my only concern. I now had a team of 10+ agents & their customers to manage & see after.

It's been an up & down roller coaster of a job being a team lead... from schedule conflicts with the Sabbath, to unnecessary jabs at my work ethic. There seems to always be something working against me at this job. And what makes it worse, i mean SO much worse, is the fact that i put my all into every shift, every agent, every escalated call, every sale, everything. I grind my knuckles to the bone at this job. Give 100% all the time. And when i make mistakes, I correct them & am conscious not to make them in the future... Yet I still am treated like I dont matter, like my contribution to the site is irrelevant. I am seeing more & more that I am just a number. A worker bee with no name, just a number... 7770...

Anyway... Ive come to the point where im beginning the job search again. I cannot continue to work as a number.
I need to have value.

I need to know that I matter.

I need to feel fulfilled.

I need to know that I have a place.

Hopefully I'll find a job like that.

I think about how my mom is a teacher & has always wanted to be a teacher & absolutely LOVES her job. She never wakes up hating the fact she has to walk into her school. She even walks happy. Sometimes I call her & she'll be walking down her hallways at school, & while she's always rushing somewhere, you can hear the pleasant contentment in her steps...

Sometimes keeping a job just because it pays the bills is not enough.