On the whole, I would describe myself as "pretty well organized."
Sometimes people stop in at my home office and opine as how they simply cannot fathom how I manage to find anything in the multitude of bins on numerous shelves.
It's no secret that running four different accounts on eBay, two on Etsy, along with a writing and editing business generates a lot of stuff!
But while it might look like chaos to an outside observer, I know where every single thing is located... and in 27 years of doing this, I have only "lost" an item twice in well over 50,000 transactions. Well... and I sent the wrong thing to someone, once.
On top of everything else, I manage to do this with three cats roaming the office... sometimes knocking stuff over.
Sidetrack
Back when I had my gallery and giftshop in Austin, Texas, we had the inventory in a rather cramped and tightly stacked back room. Ideally, we would have had twice the storage space we had... but who the heck wants to pay $24/foot in rent for warehouse space?
Anyways, one of the unfortunate side effects of trying to jam to much into too small a space was that we sometimes struggled to find things we needed. And it would take a lot of time to locate something...
Whenever that would occur, we liked to joke that "The Black Hole Clock is running" because something that should be pretty obvious had magically vanished... as if into a black hole.
Back to the Present
Today, the Black Hole Clock was activated.
Not because there was inventory I couldn't find, but because I couldn't locate my drilling rig that I use to drill holes on particularly flat stones, as part of my painted rock art project. We turn the super flat rocks into jewelry; pendants.
It's a frustrating experience when you know that something you're looking for logically can only be located in three pretty confined areas... and yet it seems to have vanished from the surface of the planet.
- Not on the shelf in my office where I keep art production supplies.
- Not at the table in the garage where I always do my drilling (it's messy).
- Not under the table in the crafts area where I determine whether rocks are flat enough to warrant being drilled.
I was back and forth between these three places at least five time, while the "Black Hole Clock" mockingly ticked at me from its imaginary spot inside my head.
On my fourth trip back to the garage, I finally had success!
What so often happens in our lives — at least it does in mine — is that things end up inadvertently "wandering" from where they are supposed to be.
An item gets moved from one side of a table to the other, to make room for something larger. Then it gets moved from the far side of the table because it's now "in the way," so it ends up on top of a box on the floor. Then that box gets pushed to the side, because you need extra room to being in the lawen mower to winterize it. Or bring in a really large box on a dolly.
Then some empty boxes that need to be broken down and stored end up "temporarily" getting put on top of the item you're looking for... and voila! It has vanished. Vanished without really "being moved" in any tangible way.
As always, the typical and most correct explanation is that I "have too many things on my plate."
And I can't say as how I disagree with that!
But we have to do whatever it is we do to simply stay afloat in this expensive and rushed world of ours.
As a result of which we sometimes have to deal with the Black Hole Clock!
Thanks for coming by, and have a great week ahead!
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Created at 2025.08.11 01:43 PST
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