Busy With the Gallery

The next big art project starts on Tuesday, and in anticipation of that I've spent some time streamlining gallery operations, which is a fancy way of saying I've updated the mailing list, paid the quarterly taxes, and finally (FINALLY) created an email list. We had an Open House scheduled for this afternoon, so I tried out the email list a few days ago. There was some positive response to it, and I had a feeling that we would get more people than usual for this Open House. We got nearly three times as many, and actually sold several things, plus connected one of our featured artists with a local newspaper columnist. So I am very happy about this and it gives me the satisfaction of having an easy and efficient method of publicizing gallery doings without having to rely on posters or newspapers.

The prep work for the open house involved some cooking and a lot of cleaning, and I could not have done it without a lot of help from Steve. Despite my best efforts, this house gets so grotty so quickly, even with just two people and one sociable cat. In the midst of the cleaning fury we agreed to sit down soon and create a maintenance plan and/or schedule, so things do not ever get quite so out of hand. I have been handling all of the shopping, cooking, laundry, errands, yard work, car care, bookkeeping for both ourselves and the business, the home maintenance & repairs, and the bulk of the housework, and it's more than I can handle on my own and still handle the gallery and do my art full-time. So the re-allocation of domestic jobs is both necessary and welcome. When I was younger I did all of the above and more, as a divorced custodial parent plus full-time landscape designer, but those days are long gone.