Over the past few weeks I've been pushing more and more towards giving up the day job and getting into the shop as the full time gig. The inherent problem with this is simply how to make this financially possible? I would love to live out the American dream by marching into my bosses office tomorrow and announce that I'm leaving effective immediately, but that's just not going to happen. This process I'm sure is going to be years in the making.

So what to do in the years to come to help grow and establish myself in the local wood working community? That's a tougher question; at least to me than the one of how/when to make the official switch from office monkey to shop monkey. Well, one of my most recent ruminations was the lack of quality shop time I had at my disposal. It's tough to get into the shop when you have an hour and a half long commute in addition to the 8-10 hour work day...the last thing on my mind most nights is not getting pumped to go work in the shop but to crash after dinner with a nice beverage before crawling to bed. So what to do, what to do...

Well the first step has simply been getting into the shop as often and more importantly in my opinion, more consistently each day. So I made the resolution to spend an hour each day in the shop doing something...anything...as long as it was in the shop and beneficial towards achieving the ultimate goal. I admit that now that I'm a few weeks into that process things are getting easier and easier to break away from and the after work slump is getting less and less dramatic. Have I accomplished my goal of 1 hour each day? no, but it's been close and I'm sure it will eventually come with more time.

The next step I decided to take on was to establish an inventory of pieces for the inevitable day that I actually make it out to an art show, crafts fair, or your local underpass...I can't sell my creations to pay the electric bill if I don't have anything to sell.This process is actually going fairly well and I should have another 2 or 3 pieces added to the inventory closet any day now. So I'm marking this one as a check/win/goooooooooal!!!

I think the next piece is to expand my horizons socially and I don't mean hi my name is Matt and I'm addicted to wood. I speak more specifically of being "in" the wood working community as best as I can. Unfortunately due to my geographic location there's not many wood workers out there that want to be buddy buddy so I have to turn my attention to the electronic wood working community. My hesitation with this is that the interwebs is a huuuuuge world and in that world reside a fair many asshats that continually do, have or are better (at least in their opinion) than anything I will ever do or be. As a result I will need to spend a fair amount of time wading through the complete an utter shit that floods the interwebs daily for fellow woodworkers looking to achieve the same end as me...a communal appreciation of the art form and craft. So the next few weeks will see me reading more than few wood working blogs, listening to a fair number of pod casts and I'm sure watching a fair number of videos...At the end of the day, if I'm lucky, I will have found a home amongst a set of fellow woodworkers...if nothing more I suspect that I will come out of this venture a better and more knowledgeable woodworker...

I know that everyone out there always tells you to never dwell on the "what if's" of life and I honestly try to live my life such that I have as few of those as possible. But one of my greatest and most haunting what if's is the demise of our family's cabinet/furniture business. What if I had given it more attention and toughed out those inevitable family fights that occur in every family run business? What if...would I be living the dream of being able to walk to work and return smelling of saw dust? What if....And this, I believe is going to be my most challenging hurdle at this point...letting go of that what if.