November 2024
November started as a continuation of October’s external facing trend, but a snow storm and the Thanksgiving holiday turned it into an inward facing month. I had a few integration breakthroughs in how I am thinking about projects. The main one being that lifestyle businesses should be more integrated into my actual life. They both were in the day to day, but they were still separate in my mind because I started them when I was still employed and needed to compartmentalize more to get stuff done. Darmera (gallery/classroom) and Montology (art and bikes) are now more integrated in how I think about my life. It is really interesting to have had this tension/unease building ever since leaving my research job suddenly relax once I just changed the way I thought about them.
Small Business as Craft
Each of these small businesses I am now approaching like a craft. Not just for what they produce, but also for the day to day operations, the accounting, and all the other little important things that I tend to ignore. The new framing is that all of these are little pieces of a larger whole that I am building. The care that I take when finishing a piece of art work should be the same care that I take in sweeping up at the end of a gallery opening or the same amount of attention payed to documenting each and every receipt rather than pushing to some unknown future. “That is future Cody’s problem!” However, this month I made them my actual problem and re-framed how to think about them. I had a bunch of tech debt, project debt, and finance paperwork debt that I decided to get in order for Montology. I created systems for dealing with each of these types of debt in the future. All of this lives inside my computer as an Obsidian vault. All of the content that I create for Montology is one and the same as my Zettlekasten. All the Darmera content (newsletters, illustrations, etc.) also lives in there. Personal and each of the business workflows had been separate, but now they are the same.
Now I just feed the Montology Beast every day with ideas, sketchnotes, and documentation about what I did, who paid me what, and the minor business expenses. I finished 4 commissions this month so this was part of the motivation for getting all these workflows in order. I am on track to have all of my expenses covered from incidental art income sometime next year. Investing in this business (aka myself) has been a great use of funds to get supplies covered for art and then to be able to use them to create value out of paper, ink and paint using art skill. Satisfying AF when I think about that.
Nature Journaling
I finished up the Nature Journaling teaching training classes and took notes for each. I still need to finish the assignments and get feedback on them in the next few months. We now have a few students that come to Nature Journaling regularly. I will take all the class learning and the teaching learning and condense them into my version of “How to Nature Journal”. Darmera is gearing up to start hosting plein-air/nature journaling retreats next year. The class prototyping and teaching has given me that we can run a joint workshop over a weekend switching between painting and observing/journaling. We also hope that if we can fill these it will be a more targeted way to make enough money for the business that we can hire our first employee.
Transition Month
November was very cold, mostly rainy, with some snow up higher. My fitness was a bit all over the place taking what I could get. We had a few straight weeks of precipitation so I hunkered down inside and did the bike trainer/art class combo. I learned some new lettering and layout techniques and them implemented them on my current 8 page comic.
Friends Giving
Friends giving with Nick and Jane. We explored a new area that was only an hour ski away from a nearby trailhead. The snow was a perfect 8 inches of powder even though it had snowed 5 days prior. We skied through a large open glade of old growth Red Firs. Old growth stands have well spaced trees (usually). I made Karaage, Caryn made salad and roasted veggies. Porters. Merriment.
The final community piece that I will be participating in (no more new ones!) is I joined the board of The Friends of Mount Shasta Avalanche Center. I had been talking with them for over a year and did a few art commissions for them already so I know they were good to work with.
Broader Community: Chamber of Commerce Board Non-Profit Board Business with public classes and events (some that are free or are supplemented by grants).
Vices Removed!
This month I woke up one morning and just decided I was done drinking coffee. I substituted green tea that we had in the pantry to get some caffeine. For 2 days I was very sluggish. I am still in the process of weaning off caffeine entirely as my green tea supply is exhausted.
I did not consume any alcohol for 6 months. If I ever had a infrequent craving I would just have a non-alcoholic beer. The new ones are tasty and an excellent substitute. I had a pre-planned glass of wine at my art opening, a glass with Caryn for our dating anniversary, and for Thanksgiving I had some beer with dinner. All three instances were different pre-planned scenarios where I would have consumed beer or wine without thinking about it. However, this was very deliberate and I came away from all three instances as just “meh”. “Not nearly as good as I remember.” What is interesting about this is that resetting my physiology and then doing deliberate experiments in different “normal social” drinking situations did not meet my expectations at all. It made drinking any alcohol even less appealing and scratched my curiosity itch. Back on the wagon for another long stretch.
These two vice habit changes save some serious cash. Craft IPAs are ~$2/beer - during the pandemic I could consume 3 beers during an evening. Yikes! If I was consuming beer every day that would be $6 per day. 6x30 = $180/month.
2 cups of light roast coffee per day was about a $50/month habit.
Compared to peak pandemic, at minimum I have erased $230 a month - from my monthly budget. Or to think about it in another way, my spending buffer is way up: $230x401 = $92,230 per year that does not need to be working for me if I were to retire at a very conservative 3% withdraw rate. The costs really do add up from daily habits. These former costs are now being put into my community project fund. About to donate some for Giving Tuesday.
Vice Update February 2025
I still drink a small pot (2 cups) of green tea every morning to get some caffeine. It is more like a $15/month habit now.
Natural Processes
Originally when we were opening the gallery I thought it would be more than a year before I would do a show, but now I want to have them once a year. Why not? It is my gallery after all! Natural Processes was well attended. We finally got all the mechanics working to keep people in there hanging out by setting up some tables in the classroom and having paper and pencils for people to make art. There was another larger gallery opening up the street that brought in some traffic as well. I sold a piece! This also focuses the art outside of comics and design drawing to put together something unique in a constrained timeframe. I am sure that I could spend even more time per piece, but I got what I came for on this project. I put together a show in just over a month that balanced my skillset, composition, price per piece, average audience of Darmera so far, the layout the gallery, what pieces would I actually want to hang in the studio or at home because it is very unlikely they will all sell. I was also thinking about the show as an advertisement for my watercolor and ink class (1 more non-drop-in spot open). I treated this show as the equivalent of an MFA in illustration. Onto the next project. :).