Special thanks to Brent Hunter for digging this post up for me after had lost it.
Following my awesome summer job as a painter, my employer challenged me by nominating me to replace him as owner and operator of the local franchise of the painting company I was operating. While I had some reservations about accepting this challenge, my self confidence was at an all time high, and I felt I could handle anything if I put my mind to it. Before I started, I knew that this would be the hardest thing I ever did so far in my life, but if I succeeded, the rewards would be great. That was at the end of 2012.
2013 began quite the opposite from the previous year. The few days prior to returning to UFV following the winter break, I had tried to contact one of the professors at UFV regarding my continued tutoring for one of his children. I then found out through a sign in front of his office that he had died over the course of the holidays. While I didn't know him that well, the experience of finding out about his death affected me in an unusual way. I wasn't so much caught up in grief so much as disoriented by a rather blunt reminder of the unpredictable nature of human life. As the beginning of the marketing season began, I was now facing the grim reality that sometimes things happen that you would never expect or plan for. If people can die so unexpectedly and without warning, my business could potentially die with just as little warning. The world began feeling a lot more chaotic and unpredictable. Facing this existential crisis, I spent a number of my evenings in my basement, performing a sort of interpretative dance as a means of spiritual expression. This experience turned out to be the inspiration for my two major painting projects for that semester.
A short while after that, my Grandma took a flight in from Calgary to visit us. While we regularly went to visit her in Calgary, it was her first time coming out to Abbotsford since Grandpa died several years earlier. She was so proud of me taking on the responsibility of running my own company, and she had a number of pictures taken of me in front of my company sign. Then, a single week after her return to Calgary, she died in her sleep. Unlike the previous death, it didn't seem as sudden to me. In the past couple years, she hadn't been in particularly good health, and I even remember thinking when I hugged her goodbye that it was quite possibly the last time I would ever do so. As a Christian, I know that dying was a good thing for her, as she could finally be with her husband again. When I looked back on it immediately after what happened that summer I felt ashamed that things didn't turn out as well for me as she thought.
On top of coping with these deaths, I was kept so busy with school, and lining up painting contracts for the summer, that I had to give up both the tutoring, and game development project. The larger of the two paintings from that semester, was accidentally left abandoned on campus after I had finished it. In the summer, I just didn't seem to have the time to retrieve it. In the fall, though, I came to see it as having been a prophecy for the greater turmoil that I had just so recently been through. It wasn't until the spring of 2014 that I brought myself to go and retrieve it. It is now on the wall outside my bedroom. I'm hoping that eventually it will remind me less of what I lost over the course of that year, and more of what I gained from the experience.
In terms of marketing, after a slow start, I was gradually getting the hang of booking jobs. When the time finally came to begin production, I had already booked a third of the amount that I was aiming towards for the entire year. Before we even got started on the first house, I had already made some very big mistakes that would come into effect later on.
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