Love, Hope and Borders

Have you ever felt like nothing is going your way and that you are stuck in a cycle that will never end? Well, that’s how I have felt the last few weeks.

I know, I know it sounds like this is going to be a negative blog but remember the title, there is a bright side!

Now I’m not saying that there have not been good days these last few weeks because there definitely have but for some reason my brain makes me think more about the negative things going on and that’s all I thought about until yesterday. I was moving some granite slabs with my brother to our new shop and he said, “It’s a good thing that deer hit your car.” Now not everyone knows this, but on New Year’s Eve a deer decided to run head first into the driver’s side of Haley’s car when I was on my way to the grocery store. Don’t worry; I’m okay! I’m not sure about the deer. I got out to look but it was long gone. Talk about a hit and run! It took a few weeks to get our car to the body shop since they were waiting for parts and they were catching up from the holidays, but I was finally able to drop it off on Monday. Thankfully, our insurance covered a rental of up to $25 per day. When I arrived at the rental place there were only two vehicles up for grabs and both were trucks. I don’t think this would have been Haley’s first option but there was nothing I could do so we got a truck. This will come into play later!

This past week we began the training on the new saw for Granite Territory. It is a CNC saw (Sasso K-600 Extreme). A CNC saw is a programmable saw that will cut all of our jobs for us. It will help us grow the business significantly as the machine can speed up our processing time by about 70%. We have been super pumped about it. I had the saw delivered to the shop we are going to be moving into at the end of February. On Tuesday afternoon our current saw decided it was time to take a break. This saw is not a CNC. It is at our current shop that currently holds ALL of our material, tools, and everything else that helps us operate our business. So now we can’t cut anything with it and we have multiple jobs that we need to turn in next week that aren’t even cut yet… Okay panic mode takes over… I’m freaking out…

My phone rings and Eric tells me we are ahead of schedule on the training and we can probably start cutting stuff on Wednesday.

On Wednesday morning we moved all of our tools and equipment to the new warehouse. The last thing to do was to find a way to move granite slabs from one place to the other. Luckily, we had a truck because it was the only car available as a rental and we had my dad’s old trailer to haul all material we needed to cut!

I was worried when the week started because it was going to be slow, and in our industry as a small business when it’s a slow week it gets difficult financially. However, everything worked out. We have moved our fabrication to the new shop. Our Sasso is cutting fabulously and everything that is going out this week is ready and tomorrow, we will start everything for the following week and hopefully more! No, it wasn’t a perfect week, but everything worked out the way it was supposed to. Good thing I was hit by the deer.

I can’t help but parallel this past week to my immigration journey– This year has a lot of uncertainty. It’s going to be stressful for both Haley and I but we have to look on the bright side of things. We will be traveling to Mexico together for the first time. We will see new things and create beautiful memories together. Yes, there is the great unknown but everything will work out the way it’s supposed to just as it did this week at Granite Territory, and I will have the best partner in life alongside me to handle what is to come.

-Jose