Everyone who has ever waited too long to call an old friend to catch up feels the apprehension before calling of knowing you have to start the updates to catch the other person up from the last time you talked. And every blogger who has lapsed in writing, feels the pressure to give a detailed update on all of the happenings since the last post. Well I will spare you the lengthy update and try to pick up where I left off. The quick detes: I left Greensboro this past August to get a "real" job in Nashville. I got there and decided it actually wasn't the life I wanted even though I actually did enjoy my brief job that was a three month temporary job of putting a company's new brand on all of their materials. I found myself always missing Greensboro and eager to get back to a place where I felt more in my element. The blog posts stopped in Nashville because of a) doing nothing blog worthy (except the time my roomies and I picked up Burmese refugees at the airport coming to America for the first time), and b) I became entrapped in work trying to balance a 9-5 with freelance...eek. Learned a lot about the value of rest and how necessary it is to producing effective work and maintaining a balanced life. Lessons learned on this theme will probably also continue to be a theme of this blog. There is much to be said for small towns: a beauty at living a slower pace (well, at least relatively), a value in knowing your neighbors and the people in your town, the refreshing walk to work, the time to actually cook dinner, the ability to live more simply with less distractions, and time to "incubate" as a young designer. It was refreshing to get out of Alabama for little stint to realize how much good stuff is going on here. Definitely an under-rated state. Glad to be back in such a great place and start exploring.
Tomorrow beings the start of week four back in Greensboro. I am working with Amanda on a grant to hold small business incubator workshops while also continuing to build a functioning, sustainable PieLab. It has now moved to Main Street in a beautiful space the designers built out this fall. We have a long way to go, but are learning a lot and getting our feet on the ground. There have been several discussions over the past week about how we will move forward, how we will continue to develop the verbage used to describe ourselves, and how we will begin to set up a client system to where we can start absorbing the commissions that are now flowing in.
More to come...