This all started in the late spring/early summer of 2007, around the time Panducky started in Melbourne, and while I was living with my dad in New Hampshire. After school got out and I moved back to New Hampshire from New York for the last time, I was working as a substitute teacher at a high school in New Hampshire. In June, school got out and I was without a job. My plan at the time was to take a summer course at UNH to become certified to teach in NH and finish my degree, and then hopefully begin teaching there the following September. Either way, I needed a job at the time, so I started looking around. One evening over a couple of beers I was talking to a good friend about how I really wished I could work at a shop, there was one shop semi-local to me, but I didn't know anyone there. I didn't even know anyone in the local scene there, I had been living in the Albany area ever since I had even owned a vehicle. My friend encouraged me to just send them an email, it couldn't hurt. I had no real experience, but I had done a lot of stuff with my car and my friends' cars at RPI in the student auto shop, and I had run that shop more or less for over a year.
So I sent an email, and almost immediately I got a reply. It was a thursday. Surprised, I started to worry about what could happen. Everything seemed great when I talked to Jeff (the owner of TE), and he wanted me to go in that Saturday for an interview. Now everyone knows I had been doing this stuff as a hobby for a couple of years at that point, and I had read the occasional post from someone about to start working at a shop or working at Honda or something on the forums. ComposiMo (John) was always the only one warning people that they might get burned out making their hobby into their job. Since everyone I talked to was encouraging me, I wanted to get a different opinion and I contacted John for that.
I did not expect what I heard from John. Instead of being negative, he told me to go for it, and said he was surprised that I hadn't already opened my own shop or got a small storage unit or something. He mentioned that he would like to have me or someone like me down in Florida in his shop that had just opened. I replied that I had no real ties where I was, and I would move if that was a real offer. When he told me it was, I had to take a step back. I just wasn't ready to move, I didn't know what working in a shop was *really* like, and I certainly didn't want to move 1500 miles away to find out that I didn't like it.
I ended up getting the job at TE, which was fun, hard, and at times very stressful. I worked there for most of the summer and I always had the thought of moving to Melbourne and working for John in the back of my head. I talked to John occasionally over the summer and we discussed it more, and I was further encouraged by some people at N13 when I was out there. It was around this time that Matt Miner and I became closer friends, I visited RI a couple of times and we began talking a lot more.
I learned a crapload at TE, before I went there I had never taken a B series VTEC motor apart. I did that on my first or second night working there. I learned the basics of fabrication, dyno tuning, and more complex swaps in various vehicles. It was a weird place to be because I really didn't get to do all I was capable of, and the politics between the two guys who ran it were bad, making at some times a really bad atmosphere. Overall I enjoyed it and I took it as a learning experience, 2007 was a good summer.
By September, I was getting sick of some of the politics at TE, and I was really starting to consider moving to FL again. John had started asking me more about it and I knew at that point that I liked working in a shop, and that John would offer me a lot more responsibility and be able to teach me more in a more active scene. Panducky was up and coming, but still young, and I had the chance to be a part of that.
One friday I came home, I don't remember what had happened at work, but I was really starting to get over it. I went out for some beers and dinner with my mum and stepdad and some friends who they worked with and I knew. They are all teachers and I had worked with them the previous spring. I told everyone that I was about to move to Florida, I was ready to take the offer, and everyone was very positive about it and told me I would be an idiot to not take the opportunity. So, I contacted John and told him I would be there in a week.
It just so happened that I basically got laid off from TE because of stuff going on between the guys who ran it, it had nothing to do with me, Jeff called me that sunday, just before I was about to give him my leaving notice. That worked out well, I ended up having a week off to get my stuff together before I left. I didn't get much done that week, I kind of just hung out with friends and family, I didn't really know what to do. I didn't really prepare anything aside from replacing a tie rod in my car and getting new tires I needed for the trip. My friends came and visited me before I left, but overall it was pretty disorganised and I just didn't feel like I was about to move essentially across the country.
I planned to leave on a Sunday evening to make it through the CT-NY-NJ-DE-MD-DC-VA metro area before traffic started on monday morning. I couldn't sleep at all Sunday when I planned to nap to be ready, I was terribly excited. I had been outside of the Northeast, but I had never driven that far, especially alone. I'd never been to the South, and I was going somewhere where I didn't actually know ANYONE aside from on the internet. Sunday afternoon came, and I was at my dad's house with my three younger sisters and my best friend Justin. They all left to go to my mother's house in the late afternoon, it was the last time I saw them until December (I was very close with my family, namely my oldest sister and her boyfriend who was my best friend). My dad was at NHIS for the NASCAR cup race up there. When everyone had left, it really hit me. I was about to leave everything I knew and go do something cool, something that would really be a lot of fun and for better or worse it would be an experience that I could learn from. I'm not gonna lie, I cried like a little kid sitting on my dad's couch by myself. I told myself no matter what, I would stay a year there, like it or not. I went outside and sat on the lawn in a chair and watched the sun set and chain smoked cigarettes. We used to hang out on the lawn almost every night in the summer, it was very relaxing usually. My dad came back around 9, I had just packed everything I could fit into my CRX and I was ready to go. I said good bye to my dad and got in the car, I was effing pumped.
So, I drove all night, bombed through New England and New York, got all the way through DC and into Virginia just as the sun came up. I took a half hour nap just North of Richmond, then drove straight through to Charleston, SC to Dub's house. I stayed the night there and it was pretty awesome, he and the lyndz were really cool, I had met them at N13, but really we were strangers. They had a room ready for me in their house, and were totally cool when I showed up and all I wanted to do was take a nap. We went to a beautiful beach and saw a picture perfect sunset, grilled some food and drank some beers, and fell asleep watching discovery or something like we were old friends. It was a good way to start my new thing. So the next day, I got up and out around 8am, it was another nice day, and about six hours later I was in Melbourne.
I arrived at Panducky in the early afternoon. John and Kevin were not there, and the first person I met was Milton, who was the mechanic there at the time. In the following weeks, they would let Milton go (which is a story in itself), and at the same time he would become my best friend down there, eventually we became roommates. John and Kevin were out at Honda, where John was getting a new Fit. They got back shortly after and I met John in person for the first time. While I was waiting I got to look around and check the shop out, and see things I had seen on the forums... it was a lot to take it all in at first.
I was told when I went down that they had my living arrangements taken care of. After a short time in the shop, I got back in my CRX and followed John in the pouring rain to my new home. This is where I met Nathan (user "sled" on here) and his girlfriend and a couple of other roommates. He didn't exactly have a spare room, but he had an office with a couch I could stay on for the last couple weeks of the month until I found a place to live. I ended up living on the couch (which was really more of a love seat, jfro has slept on it as well) for about six weeks, when one of the other roommates left and I got a real room. I ended up becoming friends with Nathan as well, who happened to be Milton's best friend, and that's how I got in with those guys, they became my crew in FL. Later John took me out for dinner and kinda gave me the info on the area and the scene there, everything seemed really good and I was quite excited.
Over the next week I got to jump right in and pretty much instantly became the lead mechanic/tuner and could do whatever I wanted. John told me explicitly that he had my back and trusted my judgement for everything in the shop. I got settled in kind of quickly with work, and I was happy. I spent a LOT of time at work. I didn't really have a life outside of it at first, I remember the time before I had a key to the shop when I longed for the weekend to be over so I could get back in and work. I really loved it then, there seemed to be meets all the time, always stuff to do. I started becoming better friends with Kevin (Hocker) as well, though I hadn't ever talked to him before I moved there, I really met him for the first time when I first met John. I consider Kevin a very close friend to this day.
This was around the time when I met Jonny Black and we traded engines, which people have asked me about. I didn't really know the whole situation when I got there, or even when this all happened, and I don't think I really learned everything until I left. The short of it is, John orchestrated a trade, where I swapped my high compression A6 and whole D swap into JB's car and took his complete B16A swap. Performance and car stuff aside, it just didn't go well. I was told not to spend a lot of time on JBs car, which it really required since the engine needed to be tuned on OBD0 with BRE (which I had never really used). It would have been cake on the ZDyne which I later learned should have gone with the car. I met JB for about 5 minutes only once, where he came to get his car, got in some kind of fight with John, and left. He had issues with the car and I really never heard much about him again, the rest has been said here before. I honestly feel really bad about my part in it because I was ignorant of the situation and I got something out of it, while someone else lost for no reason. I guess this was one of the first really bad things that happened.
John gave me my own key to the shop about a month after I got down there. The only caveat was that I did not have other people there with me when I was there alone, a rule/request which I admit that I did break a few times, but I never did side work or anything like that. I was very clear that I would only do side work to help my close friends and roommates, which was pretty much limited to Nathan and Milton. John said that he couldn't tell me not to do work on the side, of course he could tell me I couldn't use the shop for it, but he couldn't forbid me from doing it in my free time. I said I wouldn't, and I held to that almost until I left and things were falling apart. I treated Panducky as if I were an owner just like John and Kevin. It was more and more apprent as time went on that John was paranoid and distrustful not just of me, but of people in general. I don't hold that against him.
I also met jfrolang around this time and he stayed at my house whenever he came down. As we became friends I began to confide my thoughts on John and Panducky in him as things began to decline. I think it was because I started to feel so isolated down there, and jfro is someone who really was supportive and reasonable about my situation. I didn't actually see anyone in person that I knew before I moved until I went to the '07 Florida CRX meet, where I saw zulued and shadowboy, both of whom I had met at N13 only.
So time went on, and I learned more and more. John began teaching me how to weld in November/December. This was really good for me, because it let me do a lot more, and I was excited to learn new things. It eventually got to the point where I ended up also doing most of the fabrication work. I never really complained to John about it when I felt that I shoudn't be doing it or I had a lot to do, but at the same time I thought he should know, but most of that came later.
I went home in the winter for a week. I saw my family and spent a good deal of time at my girlfriend's apartment with her, and of course I was in WINTER after being in perpetual nice weather. I started to get a little homesick, but not too much. The day I flew back to Florida I went out for breakfast with my mum, and I think it was the first time I really felt like she was supportive of my situation and my career NOT going into a white collar teaching job. I was doing really well, and I was happy.
I got back to Florida and settled right back in. January as I remember was very slow. I did a lot of work on the web stuff and sales, we didn't have a lot of work in the shop. It was around this time I started taking issue with stuff John did. A lot of it was turning work away. Personally, I didn't see why we wouldn't take a slight hit on money just to get something in, since we were so slow. It almost didn't even make sense to have three people working full time in there. Around this time we also did a couple of autocross events locally. This is when I lost interest in autocross, and John seemed to become obsessed with it.
Matt came down with his girlfriend to visit around the time of the superbowl. I was starting to miss home more and more, and I didn't really get to see them very much because they had a lot of other stuff to do. Seeing them for a little really made me start to miss New England, I think this is when I really started to get ideas in my head about moving home, though I didn't make any definite plans. Milton also moved in with me around then and we became closer friends, and I started to share my doubts and problems with Panducky with him. I spent a lot of nights at a local bar and it took a long time doing this for me to realise that I was very unhappy and trying to make myself like it.
Over the spring, once John got his S2000, things got a lot worse. I received many checks that I could not cash or that bounced once deposited. I should also add that EVERY week that I got paid the whole time I was there (which was bi-weekly) I had to remind John to give me a check. I hated asking for it, because in my opinion it's the employer's responsibility, and with the bounced checks and such it made me feel like an afterthought. John did always make these right. I know my pay has been posted before, but I made about the equivalent of $12/hour salary (but often I worked more than 40 hour weeks). It's not bad, but for what I was doing and the longer hours and weekends I worked, I did not feel this was adequate. At the same time, I viewed it as my contribution since I wasn't an owner and didn't have an investment, but I did consider the shop to be my own; I was proud of the work I put out and to be part of something like that.
It really seemed like that car changed John a lot. He became a very aggressive driver, maybe that just became more apparent because he had a sporty car. He did a ton of autocross events and spent most days on S2KI.com and reading about autocross stuff and watching videos of himself and other S2000s on his computer. I found it kind of funny, but honestly it wasn't my problem if he wanted to sit around and do nothing all day. It became my problem later when I had to work on it and put customer work aside.
Throughout the spring, like I said before, things really got bad. I took on most of the work and a lot of times the environment at the shop was just hard to work in. Kevin let me know a lot of what was going on and we were close, but there was a very tense atmosphere between them, I think Kevin felt very cheated on the whole thing because he was under the impression that he would do the computer and customer work while John actually did fabrication. A lot of stuff sat, pretty much everything that I couldn't do took a long time or never got done. The hardest thing for me was not being able to talk to my friends. We had some stuff for jfro and Matt, and I was constantly caught in the middle when my friends would talk to me and I had to tell them that their stuff wasn't getting done. I didn't want to lie to my friends, so I just didn't talk to them much. It sucked, it really was one of the worst things I had to do because though I had some friends down there, I was pretty damn lonely and isolated.
In the late spring and early summer I was really starting to get pissed and starting to get ideas about leaving when I had put in my year. Milton encouraged me to start my own shop and move closer to my family and Sarah (my girlfriend). Matt came down kind of for work in June. I was pretty excited that he was down, I mean I can't really express how happy I was just to have a piece of home and a friend there at the time. Matt came in and confronted John about his fuel tank and some other work he had sent down months before, he had planned for it to be done and he was going to take it back with him on the plane to save shipping. John flat out told him he didn't have time to do it, and proceded to watch videos on his computer while Matt stood there and watched him. I really didn't know what to do. Later we talked about it and I was kind of saying "see, I told you how it is", at least that's how it felt. This is when we started to solidify plans for me moving back.
We were very busy in July, and it also happened that I went on holiday then. A couple of weeks before N14 my mother and stepfather took me to Miami and Key West for a few days. While we were there I really enjoyed myself for the first time in a while, and I told them I was going to be coming home soon. I did my best to lay out the whole situation without making it out to be as bad as it was, but I made it clear that I would be moving back to New England soon. I was only out for three week days for that, and in the week and a half following that and before N14, I had a ton of work. I think I had stuff to do nonstop for the entire time, specifically a slew of S2000 clutches.
N14 was a weird time. I drove straight from Melbourne to Bluefield WV to stay with Angry and his crew. I intended to sleep more while I was there, but I ended up hanging out more and helping Steven (farvascw) with his CRX which had a crappy tune. It was so nice to step out of being all professional for a bit and just HELP some guys out, as a friend and enthusiast. This was my holiday. I had a great time with them all, and it continued on the drive up to Niagara. I also met daveb on the drive, I think we all had a great time.
Once we got there and everyone started to arrive, it started to feel less and less like holiday and more like work again. A lot of people were asking me about John, about work, this that and the other thing. I really just wanted to enjoy my time off, and most importantly I wanted to see my friends. I hadn't seen Jon (rep1icant) for about a year, we used to live a couple of blocks from each other and hung out just about every night. I also hadn't seen Scott (rex2nr) and his wife since their wedding, and in addition a lot of my friends from NY who aren't community members just showed up to see me (if anyone remembers the silver veggie oil powered VW Golf, that was them). All these guys, and on top of that my other CRX friends from previous years and just from the forum, I wanted to relax and shoot the [crud], drink some beers and tell and listen to stories and get wicked exctied and talk fast about CRXs.
I ended up just getting pissed off talking about John and my situation at Panducky. After a few... well maybe more than a few beers, I was talking to a few people and I spilled the beans that I was going to be moving back and starting my own shop in Rhode Island. Matt and I came up with the name over the following week and we got the website. I was in New Hampshire for the week and I went to Matt's house in Rhode Island on my way back to Florida. He showed me some potential buildings and we made concrete plans about moving and how everything would go down. I started to do work on the website and gathered information and started to get the stuff I needed to start my own shop.
The drive back to florida was hard. I first drove to Narragansett, as I said before, and we went out for a beer and dinner. I remember sitting in the booth at The Mews and just thinking how much I didn't want to leave, I wished my stuff wasn't in Florida, I wished I didn't have to drive twenty hours south just to come back in a couple of months for something I really wanted. I had to stop five times in New Jersey to sleep, I just had no drive to drive. The trip down the previous year was fun and exciting because it was all new. The trip to Niagara and then out to New Hampshire was fun too because I had stuff to look forward to. I did not want to return to Florida in August and it seemed to take forever.
This is when the whole fiasco with John's S2000 started. We went through a lot of motors in it for various reasons. I did a large majority of the work until I all but refused to work on it in the end. I stayed late many times and put aside customer work. There was one afternoon in particular, I think it was on the second motor, which Kevin related in his post. We were riding together to lunch and John asked me what I was going to work on the following day, because he wanted me to assemble his engine, which, I admit I had been avoiding. I replied that I was going to work on the RX-7 I was doing an LS1 swap in. He said "let me repeat that, you are going to put my motor together tomorrow". And I just said "ok" because in the end he was the boss. Then Kevin said "are you saying you would rather have Tom work on your car before a customer's car that is making us money?" and John just said in a half childish half pissed off tone "I have a race that I'm pregistered for, and I'm not going to miss it." Kevin tried to push the subject and John just said "I have a race."
To be fair, and to be clear, this was a rare incident where John took any tone with me like that, he treated me like a friend when we spoke directly, and even when I felt like he was pushing work on me, he was always respectful when he spoke directly with me. I also understand his frustration at the time to some degree, he really had a streak of crappy luck with that engine, though it is arguable that it was somewhat self inflicted. I stayed very late the night John left for SCCA Solo2 Nationals in Kansas. We had just tuned his car and then swapped the starter (the infamous starter "borrowing" incident), loaded his car on the trailer, and packed up all his stuff. I was more or less "stuck" at the shop at the time, I think it was just after I hydrolocked my motor. John told me before he left that he would give me some extra money for all the work I put in on his car. I had got a form of raise at the time where I was getting $10/hour on billable labour, but I hadn't seen much since I literally spent three and a half weeks working on his car. He said he would pay me something to compensate that and also for all the late nights and weekends I had helped him. I never saw that money, I probably never will. I also had to get my own ride home that night after he left for Kansas. Luckily my roommates were really nice guys. John's motor started a knock at Topeka because of the starting issues we had with the KPro, and he only completed a couple of runs. I was pretty pissed because I was trying to make the best of everything, and it was nice to think that I did most of the work on a car that went to Nationals. Oh well, there will be other cars.
The S2000 never ran right again while I was there, it was one problem after another, and it wasn't always John's fault. It did occupy a lot of my time until the last couple of weeks, when I just said I needed to finish up the customer work so that it would get done, because I knew it wouldn't after I left.
Anyway, shortly after I got back there, I told Kevin first that I was going to leave at the end of October. We both agreed that I shouldn't tell John, or I would likely just be fired. Most people told me not to tell him at all, but I wanted to do the right thing and I would give him my two weeks notice. Kevin and I became a lot closer in the last couple of months as he helped me out a TON with business related stuff, and really we only had each other to gripe about the whole situation. Kevin is a good guy, I don't know how else to say it. I honestly don't know how he can keep so positive about everything that happened, I think he really got the shaft if anyone did. I could leave and I had minimal ties, but he was so invested in the business and I know he feels like he failed at it, but I can say from what I saw he came in and put in 100% every day, and when things were going bad he made sure that customers were taken care of, even if he paid out of his own pocket. I think if he hadn't got stuck with John in that crappy situation, he would have been very successful in the business, customers liked him and he was easy to talk to, he also learned stuff quickly and was always trying to help me out in the shop. I guess I can't say enough how cool he was about everything and how [crummy] it was how he got screwed even from the beginning. I still consider Kevin a very close friend, we talk every few days and he is still always trying to help me with my new shop.
So life got miserable. I had stopped going out to save money and I pretty much worked 9-5 and then came home and worked on WI. I also did some sidework during the last month I was there. There were a few local guys who just wouldn't go to Panducky because of John. Well, there were more than a few, but a few that I knew personally. They had been asking me for months to help them mostly with tuning, and once my paycheck was un-cashable, I really had no choice but to do it to have money for my shop. This was also the time when CRX Carl came down and that whole incident happened during the hurricane (ok ok, Tropical Storm
). That was probably the ultimate low point for the shop, I was ashamed to have been a part of Panducky when Carl was there. Milton and I drove the poor guy to the airport so he could get home after arguing with John. Carl had some kind of amazing ability to keep his cool which I will never understand.
I gave John two weeks notice on a Friday. Matt was going to fly down on a Friday afternoon, stay the night, and we would drive my CRX back the next day straight to Rhode Island. I kept trying to find a good way to tell John earlier, but his famous explosive personality made me a bit scared to do anything, and I couldn't really find a good place to do it. We did talk once during September, I was trying to feel him out just to see. I was mainly worried that I would leave and the shop would shut down, and I didn't really want that on my shoulders. In the end, that is what happened, and my friends convinced me at the time that it wasn't my responsibility. What he said during this conversation made me feel a little better in a way too. He told me at the time that Kevin had figured out how it would go if I weren't there, financially. I'm sure Kevin didn't do that as we were pretty close, and anyway John payed my checks directly when there wasn't money in the shop account. Either way, it seemed like there was some kind of plan if I left.
So, like I said, I gave my two weeks on a friday. It was very weird, I didn't know what to expect. I was welding for most of the afternoon. John was riding his Ruckus home that day and it was going to rain. I had been putting it off all day because I was a bit nervous. He came by to tell me he was going and had to go now because of the rain, and I stopped him. I asked what he was doing that night, and he said he was going out with his girlfriend. I asked about Saturday and he said the same. I wanted to go out and get a drink or dinner and talk about it. I said ok well I gotta talk to you at some point, and he said "ok when are you leaving?" I said "Kevin is giving me a ride home so probably in thirty minutes or so" and he said "no, I mean when are you going back up North?" I was kind of stunned but I guess he expected it, things were falling apart hard.
I finished up the last two weeks without anything crazy happening. John really started to seem burned out with the whole scene, and was very frustrated with his car. I didn't touch the S2000 much in those two weeks. I received a check the week before I left for the previous two weeks' pay, which was the normal way of it. That check did not clear. I told John he could pay me for that check and the last week when I left, but that I needed it before I left. When the time came, he gave me a couple hundred bucks with a check and some cash, and promised to get me the rest soon. I had just enough to scrape by at the time, I had been counting on my normal pay check. I still have not received all of this money to this day.
Friday came and I had to pick Matt up in Orlando. Not even a mile up I95, my alternator broke and spiked voltage, blowing the ECU and most of my light bulbs. I remember just feeling so helpless about leaving. Kevin came and got me, we went and picked Matt up at the airport. We got my CRX back to the shop and I replaced the alternator and bulbs while Matt *again* asked about his stuff that was still there. There was some argument, but in the end they worked something out, as far as I know Matt is still waiting on his stuff, and I'm sure he won't post anything because he really just wants most of it back. John and I parted ways that evening. He had something to do, and left, gave me the small check and some cash, shook my hand and thanked me for coming down. He wished me luck with my shop and that was that, the last time I saw him.
I have been in contact with John minimally since then. I informed him of the total money he owed me when I first got back. His first response was that he wasn't going to give it all to me because I "stole" the NepTune dealer license from him. Kevin had told me I could keep this, and technically the license followed me, but as the shop payed for it, I wasn't going to argue. I contacted HR Tuning and purchased my own license that day to clear up any potential problems. The total owed to me was around $1500. John then told me I should bother Kevin about it because he was equally responsible. I did not feel this was right, because that had never been the case, and I knew Kevin did not have the money to pay me. Of course I told him this because we were talking on a daily basis. Without my knowledge, Kevin and Matt worked out some parts sales to get me some of the money, that's the kind of friends they both are. I then informed John that Kevin had given me over half of the money and gave him the remaining balance, and I got one email saying he would pay me in a week. After that I sent him an email weekly, and didn't get a reply after the 17th of November. I intentionally used email so there was a written record and I would not suffer verbal abuse as I had seen in the past with other people. I recently contacted John through s2ki.com, since he was quite active there, despite not answering any of my emails. I got more excuses and am again being ignored, while he posts about buying stuff for his car and going to autocross and track events on various forums.
Back to the last night in Melbourne...
I went out with a bunch of friends that night for dinner and a couple of beers. Matt and I left in the morning and drove straight back to Rhode Island stopping only for gas. We made the trip in a quick 19ish hours in my car which was completely packed with my life, you couldn't have put another sock in there. I think coming home really hit me when I got out of the car in Connecticut to get gas and I got a nice breath of cold, dry air for the first time in ten months. There is something about the fall air up here that is just calming, almost as if you can feel it go through your lungs and your blood. It was really really good to come home, and again it was an exciting trip. I have slipped into life here in Southern Rhode Island like it's home, and I have no regrets moving here (though I was nervous at first).
It has been very difficult so far, but it's been fun. I should say too that I wouldn't have been able to do what I am doing now without the whole experience that I've told, and all the stuff I couldn't put in. Almost every day I use something I have learned, or learned not to do. The only thing I couldn't prepare for is going from being an employee to being an owner and making all the decisions. I read about it and I talked to people about owning a business before I started, and I thought I understood. I think it's somehting you have to experience to really understand. It's a very manic life. Sometimes everything is great, you're so happy and things are going well, work is coming in and new things are happening. Other times, you can't sleep at night because all you can think about is paying the bills. You can't just go out and get things that you took for granted before, you can't make plans and everything seems stressful to the point where you feel completely jaded and you forget to do basic things like eat. It's lonely for me in a different way than Florida was. Like I said, nothing could have prepared me for this.
The last thing I want to say is that I really couldn't have done any of this without support from my friends, both the community here, and *especially* from Matt Miner. Matt and I met via the community in 2006, so we really haven't known each other that long, just sometimes when you meet someone you click... if that makes sense. He gave me the push I needed to make this jump. He has made a lot of this possible in so many ways, from finding work for me, taking care of a lot of the business stuff that I do not want to do, and even finding the actual building we're in right now. I am only in RI (of all places) because of him. Matt made my transition to living here very easy, I lived on his couch for a week when I had nowhere to live, and still he helps me with stuff in the area. He doesn't get paid to help me with the shop, he just does it. For all purposes I consider Wicked Innovation to be his too, hopefully I can give something back someday.
Ok, that's it. I hope I got everything, but I'm sure I missed a few things.
