Monday, December 31, 2018

Currently Daydreaming about...

I constantly daydream about future plans.  Things, perhaps, that I would not be really interested in if I actually looked into it. Maybe??  Daydreams are an outlet.  I can imagine myself as a congresswoman, a town mayor or city engineer.  I come up with ways to save the planet! Or at least show the way.  And sometimes they are practical...involving no mind-control powers or flashy cape.  But vastly over-simplified in how easy or hard they would be...
My current daydream revolves around a concept to have a brick and mortar puppet theater that would also be an indoor fun play place to help pay the bills.  So here is the idea.  In the Pacific Northwest, we get a lot of rain.  So we have these places in malls and commercial settings that offer large safe toys for kids to play in and around.  Some of them are paired with cafes so that the parents can get a coffee and let their kids play somewhere safe and dry.  They charge you about $15 per child to let the child play all day.  You just have to stay on premises and are not required to hover.
So I like the idea of this...first of all, no place like this exists in Sammamish.  So the front of the store would be a coffee place, the middle would be the large safe toy area and the back would have the puppet theater.  It would primarily be a glove puppet theater and would feature a cast of characters similar to France's Guignol, who basically is similar to Mr. Punch but far more Bugs Bunny like in story line.  I'm inclined to continue the use of my Puppet Heap puppets...the characters of Spudbottom. But, of course, if I am to use the Puppet Heap puppets professionally, I'd probably need to get them remade for it. The $20 and $80 versions of them I have would wear out.
I envision the front being used more as a third place...we'd host game nights for parents.  We could host parenting classes...workshops etc.  I imagine, we could sell memberships like gyms.  We would host birthday parties. We would supply strong wifi for parents who need to work while their kids have Teacher In-service days and bank holidays inside.  We'd also supply a list of babysitters parents could use to leave their kids there with older kids from the community.
I envision the whole thing being a worker co-op so I'd need about 5 partners.  Because I don't know what I don't know...but to staff a place like that I imagine 6 would do the trick. Need someone who knows coffee, someone who knows kids, someone who knows financial and insurance stuff, someone who knows how to clean, and maybe another someone who knows puppets.  How could we fail if we had 6 people pulling for success!
Of course this would take a lot of research to start...I'm not sure how worker co-ops are best set up.  I don't know what sort of capital we'd need to begin. I'm not sure if such an enterprise would supply a living wage for 6 individuals.  I'm not sure which 5 individuals other than myself would wish to join this co-op. Also, to do this...I would have to retire from my engineering job.  So perhaps this is nothing more than my current daydream that gets me through the long boring meetings.

Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Life Goals

Every now and then I think: If I could retire early, what would I do? 

The answer at the top of my list these days is spend more time with my girls. But then the follow-up question naturally would be: Doing what?

My head always dreams of more puppet shows, man I love puppetry!  I'd like to do Puppets in the Park, all around Washington state.  Go from little town to little town and do puppet shows in their parks.

Everyone dreams of buying stuff, I mean, STUFF is always on a retirement list.  But if I could retire early, while still in my 40s, I'd buy an E.L.F from Organic Transit and a PEBL from Better Bike...make sure to get the ones that fit small kids in back.  These are competitors in the realm of hybrid bike and electric vehicles.  I'd like to attach 2 bike cargo trailers to each full of camping gear.  Have Dad and one girl in one, and Mom and one girl in the other and camp all summer long--spending the first half driving as far as we could get away and the second half meandering back in time for school to start.

I'd like to spend the school year volunteering in my daughter's schools and running my daughter's Campfire groups.  I'd do puppet shows on the weekends and other than that, I'd like to dabble in Stop-Motion animation and post silly videos on YouTube.  I might like to have a small Etsy store where I could sell puppets and occasionally strange hand-made costumes (these are the few things I like to make).

And I'd like to be good with money...really really good, so that I never have to go back to work again.  I've worked on other people's dreams long enough.