So 2010 was a Very Interesting Year. It was probably the most interesting year that the husband and I have experienced since moving to Montana 17 years ago, and we've had some doozies.
You may remember that the economy collapsed for most of the rest of the country in the fall of 2008 (as if anyone could forget). One of the weird things about Montana is that our economy tends to lag a full year behind the rest of the country. It wasn't until the fall of 2009 that the bottom fell out here. That gave us a year to position ourselves, which we did; however, even advance preparation did not prepare us for the breadth and depth of the economic contraction we experienced.
Both of us toodled along through 2009 with steady work until about August. There were a number of general contractors who wanted to hire my husband for projects, but all of sudden building came to a standstill because the banks wouldn't lend even to people with excellent credit (including us—I had to do quite a song and dance to get our bank to renew the line of credit for the husband's business). We had homeowners ready to go ahead with projects (we're talking very high-end houses here) who couldn't get the banks to sign the paperwork. We kept our guys busy until the end of November of 2009 and then my husband went from doing concrete to doing the dishes because he had no houses to work on.
We've experienced this kind of slowdown before, so I didn't really panic at that point. And the husband doesn't mind having a month or six weeks off in the winter when he can relax and catch up on jobs around the house. We figured things would pick up again in February as they would in a normal year. January started out with lots of visits to our lawyer as we dealt with an unemployment benefits case. In 2008 one of our employees got into a fight after work with another one of our employees. Employee #1 stabbed employee #2, who ended up in the hospital having life-saving surgery. We fired both of them. Employee #1 filed for unemployment benefits with the State of Montana. His claim was denied. He appealed. His appeal was denied. He appealed a third time and struck pay dirt with a hearing officer who believe every single lie the guy told him, even though evidence to the contrary was right there in the file. The hearing officer awarded him benefits. We appealed, but the State of Montana refused to allow us to present any additional evidence and upheld the award of benefits. (Governor Schweitzer got a long letter from me about the complete idiocy of that decision.)
February and March passed with no word of any building projects on the horizon. In hindsight, that was a good thing as it gave the husband a chance to work on the other house and get it ready to rent as a vacation rental. At the time, though, I was wondering how we would make it through an entire year if the building industry here never recovered. Knitting wasn't much better—books weren't selling, patterns weren't selling, and my business began to suffer from neglect because I was taking as many substitute teaching jobs as I could to keep some cash coming in.
Finally around April, things started to loosen up and a few small jobs began to trickle in. Our guys came back to work. And despite getting it listed quite late in the season, we began to get rentals at the vacation house. DD#1 graduated from high school and made preparations to head off to college. Friends came to visit. We went hiking. I puttered in the garden, even though it was a cool summer and things just didn't want to grow. It all seemed pretty normal, albeit anemic, on the economic front.
Having been in the building industry for so many years here, we've noticed trends. One is that building projects tend to get underway in the spring and summer, and there tends to be a lull in August. Then projects will pick up again for a few months as people rush to get work done before the snow flies. I was feeling mildly panicked in August, wondering if the August lull would last into the fall and then the winter as it did in 2009. I normally develop a pretty healthy sense of dread anyway come fall—I figure this is a normal instinctive Neanderthal reaction and I just go with it. For about three weeks I canned everything that stood still for more than 30 seconds. The husband must have been feeling it, too, because he built a chicken coop and we acquired 20 chickens.
Unexpectedly, though, the floodgates opened. The husband got project after project after project, enough to keep him busy all through the winter and well into the spring when he's already got stuff on the schedule. It's certainly not back to the way it was during the height of the building craze (and craze is exactly what it was), but at least now we're not in danger of drowning. As I told our banker last January, my goal was to get us through 2010 and still be standing when we got to the other side. We are. A lot of others aren't.
I used to think that both of us being self-employed was a huge advantage in an economic downturn, because we have the flexibility and creativity to adapt. I was not prepared for the double-whammy of 1) people no longer buying books and patterns and 2) the banks refusing to loan money for building projects. Each of saw our incomes cut in half from what we took in during 2009, and 2009 was down from 2008. I decided that one of us needed to find an additional way to make money, and it was easier for me to do that. I am working my way through the medical transcriptionist program at the local community college. There is no guarantee I'll be able to find a job, unfortunately (because nothing is sure but death and taxes), but I am trying to be optimistic about it.
And believe it or not, it's been kind of nice to downsize. I found I could do without satellite radio, although I do miss listening to the Cleveland Browns football games. We love having chickens, and I am finally going to have the garden of my dreams this spring now that the husband has discovered his inner Mr. Greenjeans. I think we've both always been heading in the same direction anyway, but we had so many deep discussions about how to keep Schuster & Szabo Inc. afloat that we discovered our goals were more closely aligned than we thought. That's been a lot of fun. Nothing like a crisis to bring people together!
On a knitting note, 2010 was the last publication year for Twists and Turns, which makes me kind of sad, but I am also very proud of what I have accomplished over the past 10 years. I sometimes feel like I am in the midst of a tornado trying to make sense of all the changes that have happened to the knitting industry over the past few years. I wish that Big Sky Knitting Designs, LLC hadn't suffered the kind of neglect it did this year, but life is what it is. I really felt like I wanted to pull back for a while, anyway, and re-assess. I think I will share those thoughts with you in another post—I'll talk about my goals for 2011, knitting and otherwise.
Have a safe and happy New Year. May it be filled with knitting and all manner of good things.
