Fire Update #3

It’s been nearly a month since the fire took our home and my studio. The demolition still has not happened, so we are still in a kind of limbo. With no way (aside from the increasingly emotionally draining compilation of our property loss spreadsheet for the insurance company) to recapture the past, we are starting to look toward the future.

Our Quaker community has been of immense help; we thought we’d stay in the Friends Center guest room for a couple of nights while we sorted out our next moves — but they offered us a small unused private apartment for a couple of months. While staying here, they extended a further offer of a larger apartment, once it was vacated by its current tenant, for the span of 9-14 months (depending on a number of things). We’re glad to be nearby our old neighborhood, and staying in a place that already feels like home (considering how much time I spent here pre-Covid). The neighborhood is peaceful, green, and quiet.

We decided, once we had the lease in hand and approval from our landlords, to make an addition to our family. Meet Longfellow, our seal-point Siberian kitten. He’s about 3 months old, and (while he’s not eating, pooping, or rocketing around the apartment) is a complete snugglebug. At the encouragement of several people, we made him an Instagram account to chronicle his adorableness as long as he lets us stick cameras in his face. We hope that, once social isolation is over, we can introduce him to some of our local friends.

Now, to business (literally). Fallingblox Designs has 3 main divisions: Sales, Education, and R&D.

  1. Sales: The books I had in the apartment were destroyed, but I keep most of my books off-site. I picked up a box of each, plus some shipping envelopes. I ordered some new copies of Victorian Raffia and Bipolar. I’ve got a scale, printer, label printer, labels — technically everything I need to begin shipping. The issue is that I simply don’t have the space to set it all up. I’m going to need to wait until we’re in the new space in a few weeks. In the meantime, Wall of Yarn continues to drop-ship for me, so feel free to order stuff on my store as usual. As always, you can follow my pattern links to Ravelry as well.
  2. Education: I had to pay 150% of list, but I did re-acquire my high-end webcam for teaching virtual workshops. The laptop I had ordered for workshop streaming arrived a few days after the fire. Now the only bottleneck is that the Meeting House only has 50mbps internet. We are in the process of upgrading that to full gigabit service. When that happens, I’ll run some tests and then open the workshop books again.
  3. R&D: Unfortunately, patterns that were in development are on hold until I can acquire new yarn for them. Projects in progress were in cloth drawstring bags in a crate in my living room. The chance that any of them have survived is nil. Just to keep my hands busy, I am working on a new pattern unrelated to the ones I’ve been posting about thus far. As soon as I’m able to restart work on previous patterns, you’ll hear about it here.