Getting my studio set up pt 1

Recording is starting. Hello, Tami Grgas here. I am— I have been diving deep into getting everything ready for my 5-day challenge that starts tomorrow about finding your hairdresser and loving your hair. I find, even in my experience. So okay, a little bit about me. I've been a cosmetologist since the early 1980s. I have done hair in 3 different countries. I've worked in several salons. I've owned a few salons, nothing gigantic or anything, but I've run my own businesses. I've done all that kind of stuff, and it's been a blast. However, I was in a salon studio and loved it there. Oh my goodness, it was— I really did love it there, and I was starting to pick up business and starting to build some momentum and all that kind of stuff. And I'm sorry, I have 500 notifications on my— sorry about that. Turn them all off. So working in the studio, finally getting to the point that I was making enough money to pay my bills, and the next step was going to be to save some money in my business and then be able to pay myself. I was so excited for it. And then guess what happened? Hello, plandemic. Bam, shut down. So I stayed at home because we couldn't open our studios. I paid for some extra education. I learned how to do eyelash extensions. Oh, wow. And that was kind of cool. Prior to that, I had just learned about doing hair extensions. So, you know, follow with eyelash extensions. Why not? And so that happened, which, you know, I ended up having to pull myself out of the studio because once we did start opening up, I had lost a lot of clientele. I Okay, so I moved down to America from Canada. Did hair in Canada for many years. And when I moved down to America, I didn't do hair in the salon for many years. I worked at a supply house for a while. I married my American airman. We moved from Arizona, we were in Arizona for 2 years. Then we moved to California for 1 year where I did get a job on base. At their hair salon there, and that was fun, but I was also pregnant. And then I worked until, what, about a week before I had James? And I loved, loved working there. It was so fun. It was, anyways, I won't go down that road. Some of my clientele that I had gained in that What was it, like 6, 7 months I worked there? Some of the clientele that I gained followed me to coming to my home because after having that baby boy, I wasn't going back to work. No freaking way. I had waited all of my life to have a baby. I got pregnant at 39 and turned 40 while I was pregnant. Wow. And had my baby boy. And through all that, we went through infertility and all that, like, I am just so happy that God allowed me to get pregnant and give birth to this beautiful young creature. And my diabetes stabilized because— So we moved to California. We were living in Seaside, California, which is right by Monterey. Paul was going to the language institute to cross-train to a new language, which was Pashtu. And in learning, you know, he was doing that and I was working at the salon and being pregnant and all that kind of stuff. And it was— I'm sorry. Kind of lost my train of thought there. So we were living at the seaside in California, doing hair. Paul was learning a language. We had our son and I had been— Oh, I know where I was going with that. So where we went, and this is how God works in our lives sometimes, it's quite bizarre. Mm-hmm. Quite bizarre. So we're in California. Monterey had this absolutely beautiful hospital. Okay. And so they were trying to refer me to go see an endocrinologist at the Monterey Hospital. At that time when they were trying to refer me, the Monterey Hospital all of a sudden said, "No, we're not taking TRICARE." Oh. So I got referred to go to a hospital in Salinas, in Salinas Valley. Natividad was the hospital, I think. I think that was its name. Anyways, I ended up with the number one endocrinologist for pregnant diabetics in the country as my doctor. Like, tell me that wasn't God. Because then a week and a half after I got switched to go into Salinas Valley to go see this doctor, then the Monterey Hospital said, "Oh yeah, we do take TRICARE now." So yeah, I ended up with this fantastic doctor who— I was on the insulin pump. It did help me. And I had a healthy baby boy. So back about the hair. I'm sorry, I kind of— digress sometimes about my story, especially when it comes to the diabetes and, and having a baby. So I did hair there for a while. Then we moved to England and we were stationed at Mildenhall and we were there for 3 years and I loved it. I would move back to England in a heartbeat if I could. I did have my Canadian passport and my Canadian citizenship at that time, but I still, I didn't want to leave my son. No way. Paul was deploying all the time. He wasn't, he was hardly home for those 3 years. So I stayed at home as well and I did hair at home. Okay. So this poor little boy, you know, when he was in a baby swing, I was doing hair beside him, and all of his life I've done hair around him. So, you know, as I met people on base and stuff like that, I kept doing hair. But at that point, I was kind of out of all the new things in hair. And I remember before we moved back— we moved back to America, um, we went over to England in 2005. We moved back here in 2008 and we ended up in Nebraska. And I remember watching a, like, Entertainment Tonight or something like that. And I saw these ladies, these actresses who, like, supposedly make good money, yet they weren't coloring their roots. And I was appalled. I was just like, what the heck? Like, what's— What? What's going on in America? People stopped coloring their hair? Like, huh? And then later on I found out, oh, that's the balayage thing. Oh my goodness. So anyways, there was a lot of new learning for me to do when I got back to America, but not at that point because I decided to go into childcare for a while, babysat children in my home, which was actually tons of fun. Um, James was a wonderful young boy. We went to MOPPS, we went to the zoo, we did all that stuff. It was fantastic. And then in 2010, James had started kindergarten and I wasn't too happy about it because I just wasn't happy about it. He was going backwards in what I was teaching him at home and that freaked me out. Mm-hmm. I feel like Kaylin's looking at me. Where is she? That's Kaylin over there. She's staring at us. Anyways, so, uh, going to MOPS, going to all those things, and then Paul retired in 2010. And it was a lot harder with him deploying from here than it was in England because in England The spousal community, spousal, I think that's the right word. Anyways, the community of spouses were super tight, super tight. Like I had a direct line to my husband's unit. I could call them and I did. I ended up like blowing a gasket in this old Volkswagen station wagon UK car, you know, drive on the wrong side of the car on the wrong side of the road. It was all like, ah, and I blew a gasket on the highway. Oh no, the dual carriageway. And they came and rescued me because Paul wasn't there at the time. And here in America, they don't have that close-knit community. I did when we first moved here, I got involved with the Spouses Club and all that stuff 'cause I thought that was normal. You know, I'm like, yeah, I'll be a key spouse, which I was in the UK, in England. But it's just not the same. It's not— people have too many other choices, and quite a few people, they have family fairly close by, which my family was up in Canada, and my mom lived in California. No close family. It was Paul and I against the world, and James. His family's in Illinois by Chicagoland. Actually, he has a sister that was in Florida, but she just moved. The other sister was in Mexico for a while with her husband, but they're back in Illinois. I don't know. I think that's it. Anyways, so family's all over the place for us. So Paul retires and we took, I think we took a month and a half off so that we could drive up to Canada. Mm-hmm. My son was 5 years— well, 4 years old at the time. And my family hadn't met him. They just— I won't go into that, but I wanted him to meet his family. And Paul hadn't met my brother, hadn't met my sister. None of that. My mom always calls me at the wrong time. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] There we go. Sorry. So I want, like, I wanted James and Paul to at least meet my family instead of just talking to them and, you know, seeing them on video. You know, there is that nowadays, but it was just It was kind of weird. So we went up there, we like drove up through the Dakota, North Dakota, South Dakota, South Dakota, North Dakota, you know, went and saw Mount Rushmore, went up through Alberta and went to Drumheller where they have a big dinosaur dig. And, you know, we kind of planned out some fun things to do with James 'cause he was only 4 and— Mm-hmm. Was going to be starting kindergarten soon. And yeah, it was fun. It was fun. We went and saw my family, saw my brother in Alberta, went over to Vancouver, saw my cousin on the mainland, and then my other cousins and my dad and my sister lived on Vancouver Island at the time. So we saw them there. And it was just, it really was a pleasant experience. So then we drove home. We went down the West Coast, and my mom and her husband were living in Redding, California at the time. That's who's trying to call me now. It's my mom. And we saw them, and then we drove straight across back to Nebraska. And after that, Paul was like, okay, I'm gonna find a job now. Well, that didn't go so well. That, uh, that was tough. That was tough. He, um, he applied for jobs, he interviewed, nothing. Applied, interviewed, nothing. Applied, interviewed, nothing. My husband God love him, is a brilliant man. He is a linguist, understands languages. He's got all these frickin' brains in his head, but he's also an extreme introvert. Like, I'm talking extreme. And he didn't know how to interview. We never even— he was in the Air Force for 22 years, never had to interview. So it was difficult for him. So I'm, you know, we're kind of freaking out. We're like, uh-oh, are we going to have enough money for the mortgage? Are we going to have like— Ah, it was a little bit scary. James started kindergarten. Kindergarten wasn't going so well. We were doing a lot of praying. God help us. Like, what do we do? Where do we go? Um, God gave me some things to say to Paul, and it was kind of bizarre. God used me as a vessel to talk to him, and it was a bit of a weird time. But he finally ended up doing a phone interview, and we ended up moving. He got a job in D.C., so we moved to Virginia. Wow. We were living in Alexandria, Virginia. Um, it was very busy there. Very, very busy. Very political. I never understood when people said, oh, living in DC or in, you know, Alexandria, surrounding areas of the, of DC, it's very political. I never understood that. Very political means Empty promises. Oh yeah, sure, I'll meet you for coffee. I'll see you then. Let's go 2 o'clock at the— what's it over the corner there? Perfect. You sit there and wait for an hour or two. That happened to me, I can't even tell you how many times, trying to make friends and trying to figure things out. At the time, I was a jeweler with Premier Designs, which I loved that company, loved their jewelry, and Because I was doing that and trying to make money doing that, that made me get out of my comfort zone and go meet people, which was good. But it still made me see how— what they meant by very political. It was just— didn't like it. We're there for 1 year. 1 year was enough. Fighting the Beltway, fighting the bottleneck. I call it the bottleneck. Like, it's all about bottlenecks there. Oh my goodness, you'll go to, you'll have like 5 or 6 lanes. Woo-hoo, we're moving. 2 lanes. Like, no transition, no, just, just, you got 2 lanes now. It's crazy. So yeah, so we were in DC for 1 year. Then Paul got, he found a job in upstate New York, which, you know, when he said upstate New York, I didn't understand what upstate meant. All I heard was New York. And I was like, "Oh man, I don't wanna live in New York. New York scares me. That's a bigger city, not too happy." He went and interviewed and we actually, before he went, he and I did some practice sessions and stuff like that. They flew him there and they interviewed him for the entire day. Mm-hmm. And then he flew back home. And while he was there, he called me and I was like, I don't wanna live in a big city. He's like, Tami, I'm looking across the street from where I'm gonna be working and it's a pasture. I was like, what? He's like, this is upstate New York, honey. It's different. It's— Mm-hmm. More suburbia type of thing, but more small-town suburbia. Like right now we're in the suburbs of— in Papillion, and it's suburbia. The suburbs of— we ended up living in Liverpool. They're still suburbs, but they're— I don't know, they're different. It's not as cliquey. I don't know. Anyways, so he gets the job and we have to pack up and move again. We move up to D.C., or no, up to upstate New York and find a house in Liverpool. We should not have bought a house. We should have been asking God, but we weren't because we still owned the house here in Nebraska. And we bought another house, so we had 2 mortgages. We did have somebody renting this house, but they weren't— their rent was not covering the mortgage. And so yeah, we were out of pocket, like, out of pocket like a couple hundred bucks a month or something. So anyways, upstate New York was a blast. Yeah. The weather there is fabulous. Fabulous. Loved the weather there. I would love to live there again, but my husband hates taxes there. So probably not gonna happen. But I'm looking at alternative places for retirement. So yeah, that happened. Mm-hmm. I did apply for hair jobs there, but getting a job there was really hard. The only people that really got jobs there were teachers, teachers and lawyers. Well, I was neither of those. I did hair, and it— Paul, we were there for 3 years, I think. I believe it was 3 years. I think it was 2013 that we ended up moving back here. And la-dee-da, things were going great. We finally paid off all of our debt and we were actually, Paul had built up our emergency fund and we were getting ready to be able to invest and maybe have some fun 'cause we hadn't even been to Niagara Falls yet 'cause we were like, okay, we just need to, buckle down, buckle down, get this done. So we spent, you know, 2 and a half years doing that, got it all done. And then we're finally at the point that we're like, ah, that's done. Now we can do some stuff to this house. Now we can go to Niagara Falls. Now we can, you know, do these things. And it— Paul was excited to invest. And he comes home one day with all of his stuff in his car. He's like, "Uh, I got laid off. The contract is— they don't have anywhere to put me anymore. The contract's done." And we were just like, like, no, we had no idea that was going to happen. And honestly, that company was a fantastic company. Yeah. And that really pissed me off because then they paid for my husband to go through some training to help him write up a resume and do all the things he needed to do to get a new job. They helped him to find his next job. And it was really hard for me— Mm-hmm. Because I needed somebody to be mad at. And it was like, well, I can't be mad at them. Look what they did. Like, so anyways, my husband gets a job back in Nebraska, so we get to move back to where we were living before, which I had never done in America. That was kind of cool, but kind of weird. So yeah. Now we move back to Nebraska. I did get a job as a receptionist at a JCPenney hair salon, because at that point we held— oh, let me think here. We had the mortgage on the house, this house that was being rented out. So part of that was being covered. Then we had the mortgage on the house in upstate New York that was sitting there and not selling. And it was gonna be a short sale. Then we had rent to pay in the little apartment we were renting. So we were kinda like, oh, we were funneling, like our emergency fund was just like poof, poof, poof, poof, poof, poof. Goodbye emergency, emergency. It was crazy. So, That happened. I got a job at JCPenney. I'm going to cut off here for now because I'm at like 23 minutes and I don't know how much I'm going to cut out because I did have a few pauses in there, but I'm going to end the recording and then I will see you again in— or you'll hear me again in the next one.