From 2010 – 2019 this website was a pastime for me. I took it seriously, the perfectionist in me allowing nothing less, but it was easy, it was fun. When I made the decision last summer to start creating new content after four years away, it stopped being a hobby for me and became a business. Every move I have made since then from interviewing web deigners, hiring one, working with him on new branding, getting Sister Rain just right, was an intentional step towards success. While construction was underway, I began to write. That is the least difficult part of this whole process, but now that Sister Rain was going LLC, even that act, natural to me, felt different.
I have to wonder, though, when did Sister Rain become a business for my husband? Was it the Friday night at 10 pm when he was shooting pictures of a bar of soap in the bottom of the tub, trying not to capture too many shadows or himself reflected in the faucet for “Done Dirty By Soap“?
Or perhaps it was the time he went to Michael’s to pick up a 2’ x 3’ cream colored matboard, coming home to cut it to 1’ x 2’ in order that it fit as a backdrop into the new photo light box he put together as a backdrop a week before?
It’s quite possible it’s the proofing of all the stories you read here, usually before coffee, looking for typos his wife and her visual impairment often miss.
Maybe taking multiple close-ups of my eye, all nixed by me because there was too much light reflecting in my iris, was the tipping point. We snapped the photos in our sunroom, in the backyard and in the garage with the door open into the alley behind our house.
It could be the checking of every image on this site for bluriness, a glitch in the software that I cannot see.
We definitely crossed a line when he went to our trash can outside to dig for remnants of the above mentioned backdrop to get a small piece of it to capture the likeness of a pin for the story, “Donation Contribution.”
I do believe, however, it was the 50+ pictures he repeated for “A Leaf Lesson” that turned Sister Rain from hobby to business in my hubby’s mind. He propped the framed leaf on his extension ladder, on top of his grill, in the window of our sunroom, all vetoed by you-know-who. Telling me to, “Go do something else,” I did as I was told, a rare occurrence only enacted as a proportional response (hello, West Wing fans!) to his rare occurrence of frustration and annoyance. Staying downstairs as he went up, I heard him ascend yet another flight to our attic, then the sound of a window opening. Five minutes later, his downward footsteps on the attic steps, him walking to our office. Another window is opened. Quieter steps on the padded main stairs, he passes me without saying a word, evoking another proportional response to his silence, on my part. Approaching me with a stern stride (a blind girl can hear it), he handed me his iPad, the Photos app open, the entire screen full of leafs in thumbnail size.
“Welcome, Mister Rain. We hope you’ll be very happy here at Sister Rain. The boss is a real pistol. She’s big into proportional responses, she’s a perfectionist, but hey, you can work from home! Just don’t leave your dirty socks on the floor and you’ll be fine.”
#sisterrain #alittlesightalotofheart #legallyblindwriter #fromhubbytobusiness
