Leader of Men

it's too nice outside to be blogging

It's been three weeks since I wrote anything here, which is pretty shoddy. But I have an excuse:

I live here. Yay me!

I also have another exam coming up in June. Maybe after that I'll have a life.

other women shop for shoes

I spent a lovely morning and afternoon in Squamish shopping for rocks. Specifically, visiting one of our suppliers' quarries to select focal boulders for a project under construction. We also visited what I have lovingly dubbed The Biggest &%$#@! Scariest Saw You Have Ever Seen.

This is what cuts the largest boulders on the site into slabs. I like the helpful arrows pointing out its killing edge. I am sure I will be encountering it again later in my nightmares.

We visited two different quarries (one charmingly named "The Boulder Patch") to select about a dozen specimens from among thousands. It had just rained and the entire quarry was oozing mud, and we had to scramble across huge piles of boulders trying to not break our ankles in the process. The foreman dropped his watch and lost a little piece of it down a crack. It was a lot of fun.

If you are still reading this post, which I fully admit is waxing poetic about piles of rocks, I commend you. They don't look like much in a big heap, but when you get up close and start examining their unique forms and textures and colours, and start envisioning how they will look in the finished project and express the intent of your design with their individual beauty, well, that's when you realize you're the sort of dork that writes blog posts about big piles of rocks.

Anyway, I found some beautiful jade Cheekeye river boulders for the project's water feature. This one in particular had gorgeous colour and texture. Isn't it cute the way they mark them, all tied up in a red ribbon like it's a present?

This is a pretty massive Cheekeye, about 5' across, and will be the main boulder in the water feature grouping. The bottoms of all of these will be sawn flat with the giant &%$#@! scary saw so they will be stable on a flat concrete pad, cored into the middle and dowelled in.

My coworker was scoping out some enormous chunks of granite for her project. The largest the foreman measured was over 7 feet across.

   

It's always exciting when you can find some boulders with pre-existing moss. Yes, I said exciting. Like finding a shirt with diamond buttons for normal people. I picked out these lovely mossy little basalt pieces for the project's meditation garden.

  

  

 

When these boulders are installed in the next month or two, I'll take some more pics and post them here for show-and-tell (if everyone hasn't passed out from boredom, that is).

 

monthly goal check-in

 

The time has come for the monthly goal check-in, and I'm pleased to report that I accomplished a tiny smidge of what I intended to, which is better than nothing at all.

Here's what I wanted to accomplish:

1. Re-photograph all leftover 2008 inventory.

2. Find myself a good small business accountant.

3. List at least 50 items in terrain.

4. Rebrand leader of men - new business card and shop banner.

5. Blog at least 3 times weekly here.

6. Revamp blog sidebars.

7. Bribe girl at work into modelling some items for me.

8. Participate/attend at least 3 Vancouver area craft events to network, network, network.

Now that I've stopped dying of laughter, this is what I actually got done:

1. HALF-ACCOMPLISHED. I got about half of 2008 leftover inventory re-photographed. Unfortunately I've been working some long hours again and daylight is in short supply.

2. ACCOMPLISHED! This was the most important goal, and I am extremely happy that I found a very good and very affordable small business accountant.

3. HA HA HA HA! What was I thinking? I got 12 items listed. I was doing quite well at the beginning of the month but got drowned at my day job in the latter half.

4. SORT OF PARTIALLY HALF-FINISHED. I have some sketches for some new branding but haven't decided on anything yet.

5. CLOSE ENOUGH TO ACCOMPLISHED THAT I'M GOING TO CALL IT ACCOMPLISHED. I posted 8 times in 3 weeks. Which is an 800% improvement from the previous 3 weeks.

6. HALF-HEARTED STAB AT IT. I prettied up the links to design blogs but that's about it.

7. THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN ACCOMPLISHED IF #3 HAD BEEN ACCOMPLISHED.

8. I GAVE IT A GOOD SHOT BUT THE REST OF THE WORLD WOULD NOT CO-OPERATE.  I had signed up to volunteer at the Swap-O-Rama-Rama several weeks in advance, only to be told a week before the event that they no longer needed my help. Oh well. But I did make it to the Got Craft show last weekend to schmooze it up a bit.

Since so few of these things actually got done, I'm going to retain this list for my May goals. Work is getting ridiculously busy again (recession? what recession?) and I have another exam coming up at the beginning of June, so I don't think there's anything more I could realisticly expect to complete.