G-L-A-M-O-R-O-U-S
When Jeanne suggested the possible return of PJP last fall, I immediately swooned at the romantic notion of owning our very own darling shop. And I'm not just saying that...I really, really, really believed it would be adorable...24 hours a day, seven days a week. And for our dose of reality, here are the top five least adorable and least charming things I've done this month as a business owner:
- As a general rule, I do not like to root items out of our garbage disposal at home. There is something exceptionally counter-intuitive about sticking your hand down there and digging around for errant un-approved items. So take that concept and apply it to a commercial dishwasher. We only have one dishwasher rack that is approved for small measuring cups and spoons. If they go through on the wrong rack, they get blown off from the power of the water and end up in this bucket thing. And when the bucket thing is full, the dishwasher runs but it doesn't really wash. And my point is that someone has to stick their hand in there and dig out the spoons so that the dishwasher works. And yesterday that person was me. It was everything you would expect it to be.
- I suffered from acute anxiety last week when Silent Stan's peeps decided to repave our parking lot on the day before 4th of July. In short, it rendered our parking lot unusable for the majority of the day and there was NOTHING I could do about it but hover about while the workers sat on the sidewalk and ate their lunch. As an upside, threatening just to drive their $100,000 machine myself to get the job done faster does seem to have a bit of an impact. Despite the now nicer parking lot, the moral of the story is that I have become someone who has parking lot related anxiety.
- I took the trash out last Thursday and one bag was much heavier than normal...as in, lifting it out of the trashcan made me think I needed a chiropractor on speed dial. When I finally hauled it to the dumpster outside, the weight and odd squishiness of the bag finally trumpeted my curiosity and I actually opened the bag to figure out what either Jeanne, Bailey, or I had thrown away that resulted in one ton of squishy trash. I never could figure it out AND despite three noble efforts, I couldn't lift the bag up high enough for the dumpster, so I just left it by the dumpster on the ground. I'm pretty sure that leaving trash by the dumpster violates some sort of City of Columbia ordinance and that isn't even the least of my problems, but I actually opened trash to see what was in it...who does that??!
- I have been known in my younger days to actually just vacuum up a stray penny on the floor instead of stopping to pick it up. (Ugh...just reading that makes me sound as frighteningly First World as I really am.) Today I looked at miniature forks on the Internet and one website offered them at $.02 each cheaper than the other website. And it felt like a VICTORY. I am likely the one person in America today that cared about $.02 difference in the miniature fork market.
- On the way out of town to the Lake last weekend, I had Behind-The-Scenes-Tech-Guru stop by PJP Buttonwood because I had forgotten to turn the air up since no one would be there for the long weekend. Nothing says "I'm on the road to middle age" like stopping to adjust a thermostat. Or maybe it doesn't matter what age you are...simply a few months of electric bills that make you almost choke on your vanilla iced coffee and you become obsessed with lowering electric usage. All future pie parties will be held by candlelight. Just kidding. Maybe.
And for all the non-glamourous and ridiculous things we did over the past month, they pale in comparison to all the fun we had and the relationships we are building with our customers. Just like I didn't know that I would have some less than glamorous moments in business ownership, I never considered that we would have so many new friends that impact our lives in such a significant way. That is pretty adorable...24 hours a day, seven days a week.