A Home Office Pro and Con Minute (Plus, Support Your Favorite Entrepreneur at No Cost to You!)

One of the really good things about being self-employed, and having a home office, is that when I wake up at 5:30 in the morning and I can't sleep, I can get right down to business, in my pajamas even!

The con is I can start my workday at 5:30 in the morning, and I can often work until 9 at night, if I don't cut myself off and use some discipline. And while there is nothing wrong with getting a lot of important work done (the kind that pays the bills and enriches my existence and what-not), it's also important To Me that I work to live, not live to work. Even if I do find my work incredibly enjoyable. (Which I do! Yay!)

The pro is though, that I have the freedom to do what I did yesterday: hang out at Redwood Park all day. There was a festival going on there, and we sold some glass, but we also just hung out and had ourselves a picnic in the sun. It was an all-around glorious success of a day. And we worked solidly through the weekend in anticipation of it. So, that flexibility is a really nice thing that I never experienced as a nine-to-fiver.



You know when the weather is nice and you are stuck in the office and all you want to do is go to the beach?

Well, I can do that.

But I also am playing all the roles: I'm the office manager, the HR person, the boss, the peon, the supply orderer (or would that position more aptly be called the inventory manager), the accountant, the tax preparer, the web designer, the photographer, the photoshopper (why does Blogger keep saying these aren't real words, whatever, Blogger, I'm the boss!), the (eBay and Etsy) store manager, the appointment coordinator, the ... well, you get the idea, and I could literally go on like this, but what would that accomplish? I have so much work to do!

Check out my latest blog post at http://openfireglass.webs.com/apps/blog/, featuring a discount offer to all members! If you are not a member, why not join?

And tell your friends: The Goal (one of the many) is to get Mike's art into every gallery across the nation. We want his name to be a household name. We want people to see his art in a store or on the neck of a passerby and say "That's a Mike Warren piece." And you, my lovely, lovely loved ones, can help us with that goal, without any cost to you! Just pass our website on to your email address books, to your next-door neighbors, your cube mates, your coworker down the hall, the stranger on the street, and tell them about your hardworking entrepreneurial family out here!

Oh, and if you do manage to find the time to do this for us, THANK YOU IN ADVANCE! I love you all!

Selling Seashells by the Seashore

Just call me Sally. I never actually thought I would sell seashells by the seashore, but that IS in fact what I do now:

My Artist made the Front Page

Mike was on the front page of one of the local papers here on Monday, and now the front page is on the side of our fridge:



They got his name wrong though (they printed it as "Warren Lake") so now we call him The Artist Formerly Known as Mike Warren, or TAFKAMW (we also think Warren Lake makes a great hippie name):



This glass layout, called a rollup, was designed and created by hand by Mike:



Edited 2/28 to add the text of the feature (it wasn't really an article, so much as a photographic feature with picture captions - here are the picture captions):

TOP: The Glass Station artist Warren Lake uses a high-temperature torch to melt colored glass into a great white shark's head as another torch keeps the glass reef pedestal (upon which the shark will stand) hot.

LEFT: The Glass Station co-owner and artist Joseph Reinik holds a finished vase created with colorful glass pieces fused onto and melted around it. He and his partner in the Blue Lake business, Scott Harris, each have about 10 years experience working with glass. Reinik recently finished a class from a master glass sculptor.

BELOW: An assortment of colorful items that have been handmade ahead of time are sometimes heated and then fused onto and melted around molten glass to make a vase with multidimensional features instead of just flat layers.