What We Do To Earn Income

We have been gone fishing a lot lately, so now that the freezer is full we’re trying to catch up with all the other work that has piled up. Last week we went fishing as a family Monday and Friday and caught a total of 72 Salmon. We went again this Monday and caught 46 more, but some of those were for our neighbor and we gave some to a family in church who wasn’t able to get out and go fishing.

That’s a lot of fish to clean and vacuum pack! It’s also a lot of fish to have in the freezer and we are grateful to God for His wonderful provision.

You may be wondering how we can just pick up and go like this, and don’t we have a job?

That is a very valid question.

There are several reasons we can live the way we do. The biggest one is that we don’t have debt, so without having to make payments, this frees us up significantly to not have to spend all our time making money.

For work we do a wide range of odd jobs to keep up with living expenses and finish out our cabin. It can be nice to have many part time jobs and jobs so close to home because we get to do life together for the most part. It can also feel like we are being pulled in too many directions at once.

Many people wonder what kind of job opportunities there are up here, and honestly it can be difficult to find a job here in our area.
The high paying full time jobs seem to be concentrated in the large towns, so since Andy doesn’t want to drive an hour or more to work each day, we’ve slowly accumulated odd jobs closer to home.

If you have been reading my blog for any amount of time, I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about the phone job. What is that, exactly?

Bowwow Hollow Puppies is a pet store in Mifflintown, PA and they sell approximately 1,000 puppies per year. They work with licensed breeders in the mid state area and have a website with all their puppies listed.

I am the receptionist. I take phone calls and answer texts and emails about the puppies. I take deposits on puppies and keep up the website as well as make appointments for people to see the puppies. Gary and Lisa Krall, the owners, are on the other end, meeting with people, taking care of the puppies, and also booking tickets and delivering for people out of state. We also have a photographer who takes pictures every Thursday and a veterinarian who comes every Tuesday. We’re all a team, and things usually run along like a well oiled machine until they don’t.

But anywhere we have phone service, we can take the job along. Sometimes it’s busy, and other times not. We get paid by the day.

I started the phone job about a month before we moved up and then Andy took it over in the winter when he wasn’t busy working on the house. He’s been busy this summer again, so a couple months after Oscar was born, I slowly started taking it over. Right now we are transitioning so that Andy is doing it more to lift the load off me.

Because of the four hour time difference we start answering the phone calls and texts at nine AM Pennsylvania time, which is 5 AM up here. That can be rough, particularly when I’ve been up with the baby a lot or we’ve stayed up late because it’s light out until 11 pm.

Andy has had a summer job at a cabin rental two miles down the road. There are five cabins they rent out, and a bathhouse Andy just finished building this spring. As the host, Andy answers calls and texts about the cabins and books people to stay. He also does upkeep like yard mowing, and changes sheets and cleans out the cabins. I’ve been washing the sheets and towels here at our house, but we might start doing that at the local laundromat since I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed.

Andy is also taking care of Matt Snader’s 25-30 sled dogs for the summer.

So if we want to go fishing for an afternoon, Andy cleans cabins and feeds the dogs in the morning and then we take the phone job along with us.

It can be a hassle, like the time on Monday when we were in our small boat heading back across the open ocean to get to the harbor. The water was rough, 4-5 foot seas, and our boat is not big. I was holding Jasmine in my lap with a hand on Gabe’s life jacket and a foot on Oscar’s car seat. The phone rang four times with people calling about puppies, but I had to ignore it that time. We got back to the dock safely, (praise the Lord! I never want to be out in seas that rough again!) I sat there in the boat with the Jasmine, who had fallen asleep on the way over (ahh the trust of little children!) and called all those people back to answer questions about puppies.

So there is a picture of our crazy lives with the phone job. It has been a big interruption, but also a big blessing since we can still go and do things while we are working. I sometimes think of it as a fourth child – a very needy, demanding one. 🙂

And that, in a nutshell, is how we make a living.

This post has taken a while to write since I was interrupted several times with phone calls, first about the Yorkiepoo puppies we have, and then about the Collies. Plus I’m rocking the baby.

Welcome to my world!