Fall beckons…

Things are getting busy here at Lake Monticello. Impudent fawns come prancing up our back slope to see what is going on in the workshop. They and the adult deer are singularly unconcerned about the noise of my woodworking machinery.

Our temperature has dropped overnight from the nineties to the low sixties. What a relief! A few weeks of brisk, sweatshirt weather would be very welcome after the humid, mosquito-ridden days of the past month.

The object in the right foreground is one of the new organizer designs I came up with for our home offfices. The shelves slide out so a compartment can be increased in size when one category of paperwork grows beyond the expected range.

Gretchen and I are consulting for another local business. In the process, we are organizing business flows and the paperwork that goes with it. Since this business does not lend itself to extensive computerization, we have devised a filing system that provides holding points for transaction records at each point in the cycle of a business transaction.

The number of paper particles in motion at any one time are less than a hundred, so a small organizer like the one shown will hold the working documents of the entire business in one place. This is a vast improvement over the business owner’s previous system which required covering four big tables with stacks of paper.

I am still continuing to design affordable solutions in wood, but I have made room in my schedule to do the work that will help this new client’s company grow to the next level.

As I mentioned in a previous post, there is real merit in developing more than one income source. One of the unexpected benefits is that you can get more selective about what you choose to do for any one source of income. With consulting income coming in, I can be more selective about the design projects I take on.

It makes both tasks more enjoyable in the end, and that is what work should be like. Work should be adequately remunerative, challenging, and enjoyable. If you can help people out in the bargain, what more is there to ask?

Now that the weather is cooling down, I’d better get busy and finish up my incomplete projects. We have only a few months before snow flies.