Not Waving but Drowning

Every so often life becomes too much. Murphy's Law kicks in and everything that can possibly go wrong actually does. Things start piling up and it's all I can do to keep my head above water. In the past few weeks:

- Our register at work broke, but we turned it into a positive situation and took the opportunity to upgrade to a Point of Sale system. Which means I've spent the last week squinting at spreadsheets, inputting products/brands/suppliers/UPC's by hand, making mock-invoice after mock-invoice trying to get used to being a member of the 21st century. Brian calls me Grandma.

- Our favorite (and only) employee Dre had to go back to school in PA so we've lost him until he comes back in December for break. He also happens to be a good friend of ours so it's sad x2. Brian's dad is working with us again so there is the silver lining. I like working with him and it's great to see him all the time. He mainly works at the warehouse, though, and the store definitely suffers with only two people working there.

- The wall that's unstable in our warehouse is getting repaired, which means workers in our way for the next week or so and the door not being able to be used.

- The day that wall started being fixed, someone knocked down, as in, destroyed, a DIFFERENT wall (holding up the only good doorway we were able to use). With our forklift. And we don't know who did it. And we're being held responsible anyway. And my dad's decided to get involved. And now it's REALLY hard to receive/transfer orders since we can't get in/out of the warehouse easily. Fun for everyone.

- Our chinchilla Sammy got sick and passed away due to a kidney problem that he was born with that just started showing itself out of nowhere. It was pretty quick and terribly sad and I still don't know if I've fully allowed myself to deal with it yet.

- The fire inspector gave us a list of things at work that he wanted us to change for this years inspection. We've been spending the past two weeks moving stuff around and putting up shelving (1. Stop using furnace closet for storage), getting an electrician to fix/put in new lighting fixtures (2. Remove all clip-lights), getting Dre's brother to build some sort of holder for CO2 tanks (3. All compressed gas cylinders must be chained/stored properly). They're reasonable requests I guess, except the furnace is OFF being that's it's been 88+ degrees for the past 2 months and we remove the boxes when we turn it on because we have common sense. And our clip-lights are not a fire hazard because we have them secured properly and nothing flammable is around them because we have common sense. The CO2 thing I can't argue about, though.

- I am so backed up on writing checks and dealing with my paperwork it's not even funny.

- Someone hit my car with their door in a parking lot and did serious damage. This is only two months after getting it fixed when someone hit it with what looked like a baseball. Silver lining: when they fixed my bumper they didn't attach it properly so this is killing two birds with one stone. I am without a car for the next few days though and I have so many errands to take care of.

- We upgraded our credit card terminal and switched our processing to our local bank. Which required me to learn new technology, set stuff up and talk to customer service people on the phone. My own personal hell so even though I said I'd call on Monday I've been avoiding it like the plague.

- Today I decided to get my work bag caught in my front door which led to it shutting on my heel and taking about 3820342 layers of skin off. I left a blood trail from my door to my bathroom and almost fainted from the pain. Definitely worst injury I've gotten in a very long time.

- We've been working on finding a venue for the wedding, which is exhausting and stressful. We've been trying to get back to our planner in a timely fashion just to get things out of the way but it's so hard when you have a thousand things going on. At 11:30 tonight we finished up looking at a list that she gave us, checking out each place and given them a quick critique. Sounds easy but with my work papers strewn all over the table, knowing that I should REALLY be dealing with them, it's kind of hard to focus on whether or not this studio is TOO studio-like or if this terrace will be large enough for a ceremony.

Feeling the way I feel right now I'd REALLY love to make some yoga time, which is laughable because you can't make something that doesn't exist at the moment. I wish I were a Hindu goddess with 10 arms, then maybe I could get all of my things done.

New Favorite Song (& video)

2 of my favorite female musicians on the same track? Yes please. Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. - Teqkilla remix. Download here: http://neetrecordings.com/blog/



Plus Kid Sis came out with a new video for Big N Bad:

Wedding Planning

In less than one year I will be getting married. I don't think that has really set in yet. I watched a few episodes of that Kleinfeld show Say Yes to the Dress and all the brides are all bubbling over with emotion. They go off on these romantic tears about how absolutely lucky they feel to be spending the rest of their life with their fiance and how their wedding is going to be the best day of their life. Is it wrong that I don't feel as excited? Don't get me wrong, I do feel that way about Brian, I just don't gush about it the way those girls do. I keep thinking of the wedding as one big party that will just finalize everything. We both knew that this was going to be the obvious next step in our relationship so it was just a matter of "when?".

I've been trying to get ideas for dresses and colors and stuff but I figure I'll wait until we get a venue so I can plan around that and visualize it all put together. To help with everything we decided to hire a wedding planner because 1. The thought of doing all of that by myself made me ridiculously anxious, 2. I attempted to find a venue on my own, called 1 place in 2 weeks and felt totally defeated after finding out about their 150 person minimum (we have like 65 guests so far) and 3. I work 6 days a week and honestly just don't have the time.

Her name is Lisa Anderson Green and so far I love her. I'll be honest, the first thing that stood out to me was the French Bulldog on her main page. Is that wrong? We set up a consultation and we all just clicked. She gets us and is everything I'm not: organized, regimented, experienced at wedding planning. Perfect. At the beginning of each month she's going to email me with what we need to accomplish and then we need to get it done. I love deadlines because I procrastinate unless I have them. Working with her is going to make everything perfect, I'm sure (especially since I don't know what "perfect" should be, and she probably does). She also has a blog that gives great planning/hiring pointers.

We have a new meeting scheduled for Tuesday (yes, she makes me schedule things...so organized) and I can't wait to get started.