Starting a business in January just after the expense of Christmas is crazy. Just sayin’! It’s like starting to walk along a tightrope, while juggling plates, and a gale is already blowing.

Sure enough a few gusts have caught us off guard, making us wobble a little.

Tim is using our old family car, a Dodge caravan, for work while the business gets up and going. It broke down the day after my last blog post heralding Tim’s launch into self-employment. He tried to fix it himself, making a few late night runs (in our other car which we’re very thankful we have) to Canadian Tire to buy spark plugs. In the end the van had to go to the garage. It wasn’t as bad an expense as we thought it might be and now it runs better than it has for years. Balance regained.

After that got sorted the name he registered for the business was refused and we had to come up with a new one. Ahhhh! Cue mild panic. ‘God, what is happening?!’ It took us long enough to think of a name the first time. We liked, ‘Right on roofing and home repairs’, but it turns out that a company in Nova Scotia is called ‘Rite on Builders’ so our name was disallowed. It made us wonder at the process of registering a name as we had to pay a company to do a search before we could do the registration (which also cost). Nothing was flagged up when they did the search. It was frustrating and the name situation was holding everything else up. We were at a bit of a loss.

At this point all we could come up with were inappropriate names like, ‘Up Yours Roofing’, ‘Rip off Roofing’, and so on. In the end we went with the advice of many to use our name. ‘Bicknell’s Roofing and Renovations’ is now legal and registered. Simple. Soon there’ll even be a bank account and Tim will be able to be paid, which means more bills will be able to be paid. Hallelujah! Balance regained again.

In the midst of these things Tim has had work to do. When the car was being fixed it worked out that he worked at a friend’s house where I could drop him off and pick him up when I went to and from work. He’s had other things to be getting on with, but it will be a big relief to get everything set up properly.

Meanwhile life goes on for us all. Working full time leaves me always on catch up so I haven’t posted as much as I’d like, but I’m re-jigging the way I do things to make some time for fun, i.e. writing, sewing and a bit of baking! I need to add in some exercise somewhere. Let’s see how that goes.

Yesterday, determined to get out in the sunshine rather than just collapse in exhaustion as often happens on Sunday afternoon, I took the dog for a walk. No one else wanted to come – Tim was napping, one child was revising, another was out, another didn’t want to, and one didn’t respond at all.

As it turned out that was just fine. There’s been no snowfall here for about a week and a half, the storm that hit the US missed us completely. It wasn’t horribly cold. Roxie enjoyed throwing herself into the snow and rolling around every few metres. I didn’t go so far as that, no snow angels for me, but it was kind of a joyful walk. It’s been so busy I forget that I need to get out, that it is actually a good thing to be outside in actual fresh air.  I didn’t realize how much I needed to let go.

Trust is what I’m learning about, always. Sometimes it’s not until we stop trying to keep ourselves on the tightrope that we find there’s actually someone holding us up there, keeping us going, and turning that wobbly tightrope into a straight road ahead.