Hard to believe I've been in New Mexico for five years already. The big news is that the owners of the gallery I have been successfully managing for the past five years put it up for sale a few weeks ago; it spent nine days on the market and already has a buyer. I knew it wouldn't take long but the speed of the process is ramping up. I have now moved my studio tools and stuff back home (which is only a few minutes away from the gallery) and will set up a dedicated jewelry area in our studio. I am going to splurge on my birthday this weekend and get an actual metalsmithing workbench.
The next few weeks will be spent getting through the Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque (the busiest time of the year), and then after that I will spend most days dismantling the gallery and getting artwork back to the artists, and all the other cleanup that it will take to empty the place. My employers have always been very good to me and I will receive a paycheck through December, plus a nice severance check so I will have a little cushion before I decide what I want to do next.
It is kind of exciting to wonder what I will do next now that I am firmly established here, married and with a house. Had I remained single, this would've been a HUGE sea change wondering what I was going to do when I would've lost my tiny living space behind the gallery. There are no rentals in the area at all, so I really would have been faced with a huge decision on whether or not to stay in New Mexico at all.
As far as future work goes, a lot is contingent on how my hands/wrists hold up. I am still having a lot of problems with them. I can make a "little" jewelry each week, but can barely play my guitar anymore or do anything remotely repetitive, so a lot of the kind of physical jobs I used to do in the past are going to be out for me. I don't really relish sitting all day in someone else's gallery all day twiddling my thumbs, as I like to be active at work. I'm thinking that at first I would like to just work part-time somewhere (coffee shop? the tavern?) while I spend my other time trying to make enough jewelry to add a third gallery. The nice thing is as I can take a little time deciding all this. I'm probably going to end up having yet some more hand surgery in December due to "bone spurs" on the outsides of my hands causing the tendons to be irritated.
It's kind of weird to think of the cycle that every four to five years everything in my life completely changes. This has been going on for years like this!
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