Author: jaymathes

Most of you probably don’t know this, and I want you to know it. About a month ago, I wrote a post about how making a career in music is difficult to do. Yeah, I meant it.

The biggest difficulty has always been in the tense balance between doing what you love and making enough money to live on. “Money: it’s just green paper,” a good friend of mine often says. And, for me, needing that green paper has led me to get a part-time job at a computer company in Naperville, IL. It’s a great job – honestly – with a great staff and boss. It’s just not music, though.

Okay. Enough about that. You all just needed a little background before I went off on the real point of this post:

As many days as I work in Naperville are (almost) as many days that I ride my bicycle. Yes, to and from work, 12 miles, round trip, on the road (half of my route doesn’t have sidewalks, and the half that does is completely unsafe to use – due to traffic patterns, layout of the sidewalk, other pedestrians, etc.). Looking for a complete range of bicycles? For Ecosmo Bikes’ complete range of ladies bikes, just click here, you will find the most comfortable bikes.

You should also know that Megan works in the exact opposite direction of where I work, and she works twenty minutes away from our apartment (30 from where I work), so she takes the car. By me riding, we save around $200 in gas – every month.

So. I just wanted to say that I’m getting sick of riding my bike to work. But I’m not sick enough to waste $200 a month in gas. Plus, it’s healthier for me and the environment.

Just this afternoon, I finished reading a book that I bought last week on Screen Printing. Basically, I’ve decided to start screen printing my own T-shirts and, maybe, a few other things, if I can manage it. It’s an investment of a couple hundred dollars, but after I print two different T-shirts using my supplies, it would have cost the same amount (or more) to buy the shirts from another company. Plus, I hear it’s really fun to do.

So anyway, the book I bought was written by some folks over at Print Liberation. They sound like some really cool people, and they wrote a great book. Oh, by the way, it’s called “Print Liberation: The Screen Printing Primer”. So, not that I need to diversify any more or anything, but I’ve decided that having this sort of “equipment” might be beneficial in the future anyhow: I can print shirts or other paper art for fun, and maybe even help out friends by printing stuff for them.