Bad Business Practices 101

I *just* - as in minutes ago - got my company's new holiday products listed on my company website. Yes, I am a horrible horrible businesswoman. I know I should have gotten it done weeks ago but it just never happened. The main culprit is my computer which still refuses to allow me access to my own website. So I had to pull up my relic of a business school computer. Granted, it takes 10 minutes to boot up but it gives me access to my own site.

I may be asking Santa for a new computer this year. I've been good, right?

In other news, I received a certified letter on Monday which sent me into an absolute tizzy. Certified letters never contain anything good and my head ran through 101 scenarios - none of which were positive - before I went to go pick up the letter on Tuesday as I had been at the part-time gig when they tried to deliver on Monday and they needed my signature. Only to complicate matters a massive (well, massive by Northwest standards) snowstorm had surprised my city and we were basically all in lockdown starting Monday night. So I carefully dug my car out and made it to the post office only to find out that in the chaos of the snowstorm the day before, my certified letter had somehow been misplaced. "Oh don't worry, I'm sure we'll find it before too long," the nice post office people assured me as my heart raced convinced that I was now headed to the clinker for some unknown offense that I wasn't addressing.

Long story short, the letter finally showed up on Friday but not before I lost a tremendous amount of sleep over it and likely cut a year off my lifespan. Turns out I hadn't put my telephone number on a specific piece of administration paperwork and they need said telephone number (and apparently $50 for their troubles) to be able to file it properly.

Needless to say, I feel a tad foolish for my reaction. But on a more positive note, said paperwork is now back in the mail to them (with their $50) and I have all my holiday products listed on my website. Oh - and Thanksgiving went off without too much trouble thanks to the fact that the snow melted enough to allow my better half to make it to the smoked BBQ joint that I had ordered our turkey from. Seriously - outsourcing the turkey makes the whole day much more enjoyable!

Bad Blogger

A title I've definitely earned as of late - bad blogger! It's not that I don't think of posts - it's just that the technology doesn't currently exist to turn my thoughts into actual posts and time is something I'm having a hard time finding lately. I've been getting in a surprising number of last-minute wholesale orders (well, last minute when you figure Thanksgiving and the true beginning of the holiday season is next week) and of course all of those retailers want me to ship their orders right now!!!!! I debate telling them that if they had thought ahead and either ordered before now or, at the very least, preordered so that I could have had their order ready and waiting to ship, then they could have it right now. Instead they go to the back of the ever-growing line.

Then toss in the part-time gig, a friend in town last weekend, family coming into town next week, and two retail shows in the next two weeks and things are a bit frantic. My mother asked me what I wanted for Christmas the other day and I told her what I could really use is an extra week before Thanksgiving to try and get everything under control. Instead it looks like it's full steam ahead until Dec. 23rd when I'm shutting down the business (and possibly myself as well) until after the new year.

In the meantime, I got a call from a larger company that I dropship items for asking what I had in line for Holidays 2011. My head just about exploded when I heard that. 2011 - I'm still trying to figure out how to make it through 2010 in one piece! That's a phone call I have to return on Monday...do you have any ideas?

When did November show up?

All of the sudden it's the first weekend in November and yet the house (aka - my office) is still full of orders going out the door while I also try to tackle some other projects I need to get done before half of my family descends on my tiny house for Thanksgiving. My to-do lists are growing longer and yet no matter how much I get done in a day I don't feel like I'm making much headway because for everything I manage to cross off there's at least two more things that get added to the list.

My better half is also in the midst of his usual fourth quarter craziness (he's currently on the first of what will likely be several conference calls this weekend) and this past week I don't think we actually managed to spend any time with one another because each of us were constantly going different directions.

I'm also working on some pretty big projects at my part-time zoo job that I undertook because I saw tremendous room for improvement. Everyone's excited about the ideas, I'm super excited about them, but it's an awful lot of work. It'll be fantastic at the end of the day but for now my days are literally jampacked. A typical day starts with my company work, zoo work for part of the day, then back to my work until bedtime with little time to breath.

It won't last forever - I know that my orders will slow down at some point in the near future (though then I need to get ready for two retail shows I have the first two weekends of December) - and pretty soon we'll be able to enjoy some lazy weekends again. In the meantime though it's a busy few months here.

But you know what, in this economy I can't tell you how grateful I am that both my better half and I are as busy as we are. Not to get too spiritual on anyone here, but I truly feel that we are incredibly blessed right now so while I may be tired I am not for a moment complaining. This economy will hopefully be the toughest that we ever see in our lifetime and so far the little liferaft we've strapped together is riding out the storm pretty well.

Locked Out

For some reason I'm getting locked out of everything lately. First I was locked out of this blog for several days (which is why you haven't heard a peep in a while) and now I'm also locked out of my own company website. I have no idea why. The website works on everyone else's computer and even works on my better half's computer which is running on the same wireless internet so I literally have no idea what's going on. Anyone have any thoughts?