Counting Inventory and Taking Stock

The title of this post describes how my new year begins, and it's how the old one ended last night.

Raw Materials

Finished Goods: The Giverny Cowl

Taking inventory is an organized, controllable event. Taking stock is not.

You may have noticed my glaring absence in the past year. You might even have given up stopping by here because there were never any new posts. How to win you back is one of the things on my list in the "taking stock" category.

First, a little explanation.

In the spring of 2013, my elderly mother finally decided she wanted to move to Portland. After lots of refusals to come here, she finally decided, in her eighties, that she wanted to leave my home town in the Midwest, where her whole life had been centered. At the time she lived in the best continuing care facility in that town, and it had taken some doing to arrange her residence there. Oh, and she had some serious health problems.

A lot of you might use good common sense and encourage someone in that situation to stay right where they are. But some of you, like me, my sister, and my brother, would feel like you must move heaven and earth to make such a relocation happen.

You will be spared the details of our six months of planning, the next 10 months of our personal caregiving, and the sorrowful last two months of end-of-life care. The remembrance of every day in the past year is still so vivid in my mind and the pain of losing Mom three months ago is so raw, that I cannot speak of it, and you, dear reader, likely have your own grief to process or problems to solve.

So that's why my absence from this blog, why no new things got added to my Etsy shop for a year, why pageviews for my Etsy shop have plummeted, and why it's a perfect time to take stock of things.

How to move on? That's a good question for us all at this time of year. We examine our beliefs, relationships, career, and health. We set goals for the new year and make promises that we try to keep for a while.

It's still a little mystery how I will continue with this blog. What will be the content? Should I write more tutorials, or should they perhaps go in a newsletter for those who are interested in them. Should there be more writing on costume history? Information about Oregon?  Current fashion opinions? It feels like I've lost my voice, so there may be some experimentation. I'll need your feedback.

Happy New Year! I'll be here counting until it's time for the Rose Bowl game. (Go Ducks!)