2022

If my streaming history from the last twelve months is any indication, 2021 was a slowly deflating whoopie cushion. My year began with a fresh new subscription to The Criterion Channel, and ended with a force fed diet of Fox's 9-1-1, a network procedural drama about first responders, seemingly written by 7 year olds.  

Was it intellectual devolution? Emotional preservation?  Mad Cow Disease?  Inconclusive.  

This cerebral descent may have had something to do with how I was filling the other 14 hours of my waking life.  Since launching Bobbie's Boat Sauce in 2018, I had yet to captain the sauce business full time.  I quit my advertising agency job in 2020, to focus on my nascent business…6 weeks before Covid-19 shut down the global economy.  The timing was such that I was ineligible for unemployment or PPP loans, which truthfully, was a blessing. I was lucky enough to find work in the industry that I had just left, and spent the last 22 months dividing my time between Freelance Creative Recruiting for advertising agencies, and running Bobbie's Boat Sauce.  

In theory, it was a great lifestyle.  I worked as much or as little as I wanted, I enjoyed the work that I do in both industries, and I got to work from home with my beagle and best friend, Sarge.  But after almost 2 years of juggling multiple email addresses, calendars, and identities, I felt like I wasn't doing any of my jobs very well, especially the business I had built and was running solo.  I couldn't find the time or energy to tackle any long-term strategies, opting always to react to whatever fell in the urgent/important quadrant. Once I would knock all the urgent/important things off my list, then I would turn to strategic planning and creative ideating...except actually I would just dissociate on Instagram and TikTok.  

Hence….9-1-1, starring Peter Krause and Angela Basset.  

As the holidays approached, and requests for my time as a recruiter showed no signs of slowing, I started to see that I was either going to have to jump off this treadmill, or keep riding it, knowing that the year ahead would look much the same as the one making me feel so…tired.  It's hard to turn down work, and scary to walk away from opportunities.  But I could only see one direction that the winds of this multi-directional hustle was taking me: run aground.  

I'm excited and terrified to start this year off captaining Bobbie's Boat Sauce full time, for as long as I can, which may be 6 months, or 6 years, but definitely not 6 days, like it was in 2021.  The start of a new year is full of possibility, and inevitably it takes unforeseen turns. 

I hope to bring Bobbie's to more markets, and more regions this year. 

And bring some more Boat Sauce products into the world. 

And write with more consistency...though I can't promise my subject headings will improve.  

I genuinely can't wait to see what this year has in store.  

Thanks for your business, your encouragement, and for being with me on this voyage.