Hello everyone! It's been a wild month while I adjusted to my new job and schedule, but a good one, overall. For brief context, I started a new job last month, working a 4 day, 10 hour shift schedule, great pay and benefits, with an hour commute both ways by bike. The shift is also late; 3pm to 2am, my time. I'm a morning person, who has worked from home for several years with no coworkers, and I haven't ridden a bike since college. There was a lot of change to swallow all at once, and to top all that off, my bike (when I finally got one) ran into issues several times. But things have mellowed considerably, and I've earned enough money to where I can get to the whole point of this job to begin with, and start issuing refunds for my main commission queue while working off anything not to be refunded, until I'm back to zero commissions and can decide where to go from there.

A while back, I made a Trello board that shows everything I have owed to everyone, excluding the photo commissions. You can use Ctrl+F to find your name in the left columns, and see what commissions I owe you. The names are sorted into months, as a loose guideline of when I think I'll be able to refund everyone. The timing may shift as I go, since money rarely goes exactly as you plan it, but you can see now that I've begun to make strides in contacting and refunding everyone. Not every single item will be refunded on that list, as some commissions are special cases that must be completed, or may already have work done on them, etc. But my goal is to refund as much as possible, so I can reach zero things owed as quickly as possible.

The photo style commissions are not part of this refund process, and will be completed over this next month. My reasoning for this is because the main queue is populated with commissions that were made over two years ago. A lot of the information in them is outdated at this point, and I fear that if I took the time to contact each and every client for updated info and reassessed the price if they want something new that's a different amount, it would take me another two years to finish this entire thing. I think both my clients and myself are tired of waiting on me to get this taken care of, so I'd rather go the refund route, even if it does lead to some disappointment.

I'm planning on posting journals more regularly, to talk about things going on and just because I think it's fun. I'm finding that things like twitter and bluesky and other social media hubs don't appeal to me as a way to connect, these days.