A Day Off

(picture of the fog at the Washington Coast)

Sometimes all it takes is a day off to regain some clarity, right? I don't normally do this but this post will be more personal then small business oriented so feel free to move on if you're looking for the usual hard-hitting news features I typically write (heavy on the sarcasm).

So yeah, I was upset about the employee flacking and flustered by the fact that I felt up a creek without a paddle. The issue I'm running into is that I'm leaving for our first tradeshow in just over two weeks so hiring someone now to then have them stop working for a week while I'm away seems almost like more hassle then it's worth. Granted, the important lesson I've learned in all of this is that it was totally my fault for letting myself get into this situation in the first place. I should have hired a replacement and had him/her working prior to the old employee leaving. Ok, lesson learned.

Despite all the work and stress that feels like it's piling up, my better half and I had made plans to go camping this weekend. It momentarily crossed my mind to back out of it and focus on work all weekend but, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm trying to do a much better job this year of keeping my family (human and animal) as the first priority even during the busy season. Which meant that yesterday morning after a brief workout we packed up the car and headed out to the Washington Coast to go camping with the dogs. I should mention that this was the first time the dogs have ever been camping so we fully expected to get to the campground and have to turn around and come home.

(my dogs - who were not prepared for the drop in temperature due to poor planning on their mom's part!)


I'll keep this reasonably short but we ended up spending the night at a state park on the washington coast. It was beautiful, albeit somewhat surreal thanks to an enormous fog bank that had rolled in, and it was a very chilly 54 degrees when we got there despite it being 90+degrees in Seattle when we left.

(I'm not one of those people who dresses her dogs but the younger one was shaking and I felt horrible so she got to wear my jacket for a little while to warm up. Can you say spoiled?)

Needless to say we weren't totally prepared for the drop in temperature but everyone made it through the night in one piece, the dogs seemed to have a great time playing on the sand (which helped us have a great time), and the pups have been asleep ever since we left the beach.

(A very tired little pup!)

And to bring this back around to business again - it was incredibly good to have a little 24 hour mental vacation from the business and I'm feeling far better situated to tackle everything this next week is going to bring me.