Ma and me got this notion back when she first arrived by mail order \u2013 hoping for a new start, a New Land, an employed suitor, only to find herself at the tail end of an island where jobs and work were non-existent \u2013 to start our own little business. Being a librarian, well, an unemployable librarian unless she wanted to commute to hell and gone, she considered a used book store. We dug around a little, looked into renting a space above some shops in downtown Stanwoodopolis and made inquiries. They wanted a three year lease, no escape clause. We worried the elderly would never make it up the stairs. Or the lazy either. And we fretted that the illiteracy rate of Stanwoodopolis might spell our doom the first year and we\u2019d owe two more years of rental on the dust bunnies.<\/p>\n
Our next entrepreneurial investigation was to start a nursery, maybe buy some land, plant a few botanicals, grow the business organically. Meaning, it would be a slow return on our investment. But hell, we weren\u2019t hedge fund managers, we were managers of hedges. We\u2019d do it the old fashioned way, work hard, be frugal, build the business step by step.<\/p>\n
We needed a few acres and a water source. Down on the South End there were plenty of acres, not much water. We didn\u2019t have the money to buy a parcel AND dig a well so we looked for land with springs, something we could dam up a little stream maybe and use it to irrigate in the drought months, and sure enough, we found a place a mile south, got the asking price \u2013 about $15,000 for five acres \u2013 then called the County to make certain we could operate a nursery.<\/p>\n
The nice folks at the County said they didn\u2019t know. We could if we lived on that five acres, not sure if we didn\u2019t. I said we sort of need to know if we were going to buy the land and get a loan to start up operations. They said they just couldn\u2019t say yes but they didn\u2019t want to discourage us by saying no either.<\/p>\n
I won\u2019t say we had a real firm business plan developed, just some seedlings of ideas really, mostly like the kind that die off for lack of money. Or water. Or a county closing us down when word got out we were operating an Illegal Flower Operation. In the end we didn\u2019t buy the land and we didn\u2019t go into debt and we didn\u2019t corner the nettle market on the South End. We did manage to make a Go of it here, we worked various jobs, we stayed together. I\u2019m kinda glad the County wasn\u2019t more helpful. I\u2019m real glad we never asked about a marriage license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ma and me got this notion back when she first arrived by mail order \u2013 hoping for a new start, a New Land, an employed suitor, only to find herself at the tail end of an island where jobs and work were non-existent \u2013 to start our own little business. Being a librarian, well, an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[2311,2310],"class_list":["post-12403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantings-and-ravings","tag-hedge-fund-on-camano","tag-island-county-permits"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12403"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12404,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12403\/revisions\/12404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}