A friend of mine has also been watching the spiders in her yard, and told me that one of hers had a whole lot of males in the web, not just one like my Mr and Mrs Carlotta. Well, it was unlike my formerly monogamous Carlottas. Apparently in the web, it is 1976, and the key party is in full swing. A couple wild and crazy guys showed up this evening, and as of now, there is no way I would go hang out and watch them without the safety of my living room window between us. Just now, big mama was working on a large dragonfly for dinner, which was mesmerizing enough for me, and one of the W&C guys came shimmying up, wanting her attention. She was having none of it. She chased him off repeatedly. I noticed that he was down a few legs, much like she and the original man in her life. Is this common? Spider legs getting pulled off? Is this a thing? I wondered whether these particular orb weavers were just a little more violent than most. Carlotta is a lot more twitchy now that she is getting ready to be a mother. Can it be autumn already, so I can have my deck back? I'd like to be allowed to sweep it and check on my plants, but I am not going anywhere near the cranky lady.
The topic of generating income keeps coming up in conversations all around me (with just about everyone I know). I keep pondering what my next steps will be. I have a job waiting for me if I ever make it back to Colorado, but I can't say for certain when I will be back in those parts. The man has shipped home enough stunning, handmade rugs from his travels for us to open up a serious retail business, and it is a very real possibility that we could go into business selling them in the not too distant future. But I always come down to wanting to write full time. I have tried in the past to do the things that I love for money, and it has often ended badly. I still carry with me the lessons I learned when I tried to turn my passion for costume designs into my own company (mine and my partner's), with a production facility, massive inventory, and employees. If I hadn't had to move at the end of the second year, we might have turned a profit, but I had to leave just as we were getting off the ground. We poured our blood, sweat, and tears into building it, and by the time we broke up the company, I was so tired, and so overstretched financially and creatively, I burned out completely, and have barely designed costumes since. Every time I make up a new recipe, or turn out a phenomenal dinner, like I did tonight, I think how much fun it might be to start a catering company or a food truck. And then like a ton of bricks, the memories hit me of how much I ended up hating sewing by the end of a few years of trying to sell my work. I don't know how to do anything in moderation. Once I get going on something I think will pay off, I will work fifty, sixty, seventy hours a week, trying to do it all at once, until there is nothing left of my dream but a bitter shell. But so far, writing has not turned into a burned out hull. I won't let it. If I recall correctly, this is post number 461, meaning around 459 days of writing in a row. And I don't hate it yet. I wish for a night off once in a while, but I don't want to stop creating. Maybe there's hope for it yet.
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