Silly Thoughts and May the God of Fortune Smile Upon Us All

I giggled to myself this week. Somewhere in the realm of Gods and ethereal beings, I imagined the Chinese God of Fortune living it up with wine and mojitos. That’s why he’s so generous and has time to grow an awesome beard.

Usually, I daydream a lot and imagine really nonsensical things. I think that's important. Even at my busiest, I try to have time to imagine at least one or two silly thoughts per day.

I spent Chinese New Year this week with my kung fu school, ringing the gong beside the God of Fortune. Chinese New Years is always a crazy time of year for martial arts shows and demonstrations. It’s a fitting way to start the year as a weaponry seller.

This week a lot has happened that forced me out of my Gollum-cave.

I moved Fire and Steel into the new warehouse space and have been dealing with the wonderful – by wonderful, I mean terribly nerve racking – process of moving. There’s a lot of hidden fees and time sinks that you might not consider until you go through the process: Setting up commercial utilities accounts, time required to move inventory, costs associated with setting up store fixtures, negotiations for said store fixtures, taking measurements, speaking with insurance companies, etc.

This weekend, I also went blacksmithing with my friend Dave and proudly made my very first leaf in his workshop.

Dave has the patience of a saint and makes blacksmithing look deceptively easy. But I guess everyone needs to start somewhere, right? It takes a lot of practice to properly control the blacksmith hammer and to understand the way you properly use it in conjunction with the anvil. This small thing below took me an hour to make (!!) With practice, I'm hoping I'll get faster. Designing stuff in Photoshop and Solidworks is a lot easier than making it!

Then I was invited to attend a gaming convention in Montreal as a vendor from February 10 to 12 (see store news for details). In between all this, I filmed a fun weaponry-related Youtube video as well and met up with a Youtuber friend of mine to get feedback and business advice. I’m hoping to have that video up later this week.

I call it time-tetris when I try to be as productive as possible, cramming as much stuff as possible into my day. Sometimes I forget to take a step back and breathe.

And it occurred to me how glad I was that I took some time out of my week to ring a gong beside the God of Fortune and giggle about him having a mojito somewhere.

There’s something to be said about the simplicity of living in the moment. And being happy watching lions dance and just keeping a beat and gonging a gong for half an hour, literally ringing in the new year with my kung fu school.

I’m often so focused getting some end result that I forget to appreciate these moments in between. And I forget to have those one or two silly thoughts in a day.

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