Triple Booked.

If you happened to stop by PJP Buttonwood today, you probably learned that today is Jeanne's birthday.  And if you are wondering how we celebrate PJP-style, I'll tell you the secret:  she had a 90-minute hot stone massage at Backspace while I stayed behind to be the captain of the PJP ship.  And all was going along swimmingly until I realized I booked three appointments to work on three different things with three different people...all at the same time.  And then Square stopped working.  And the phone kept ringing.  And I desperately needed a clone of myself, or a personal assistant, or both.  I know there are apps (or Siri) that will track appointments and remind me of stuff, but will they tell me when I'm leaning toward trying to do too much stuff at one time?  (I'm looking for someone who calls it like they see it.) So before Jeanne even left for her appointment, our friend Aaron Ottis showed up with all of his photography gear to work on a project that we've long had in the works - professional photographs of each of our nine-inch pies.  We would like to have a set to use at our discretion on our website and our on social media sites.  In a perfect world, Aaron would photograph them as soon as we pulled them out of the oven.  Except everything took 1,000 times longer than it should today and he spent most of his day just waiting around for us to get stuff done.  Sounds about right.  By mid-afternoon, he had shot roughly half of our PJP selections and all the random pies (think Old Fashioned Raisin, Almond Rum Raspberry, Brown Butter Chess, and more) are on tap for tomorrow.  And this is my way of telling you that if you love the non-regular pie and always wished you could buy it in a nine-inch version, TOMORROW IS YOUR DAY.  We will be selling most of what is made for the photo shoot...so you can have your perfectly photographed pie and eat it too.

So while Aaron worked to photograph all the pies, a Tom from Shillington Box Company in St. Louis arrived for his appointment to discuss shipping nine-inch pies.  We currently only ship our jelly jar pies, but we get quite a few requests for the larger pies to hit the UPS shipping routes as well.  We've struggled in the past with finding the right box and so we were curious to see what our new friend Tom was bringing us.  Good thing both Aaron and Tom are exceptionally patient people...

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And while Tom folded boxes, a sweet journalism student stopped by with her video camera for our pre-scheduled interview.  The fall semester is officially underway when we have a journalism student per day with video cameras and note pads in hand in our space.  We actually don't mind at all and we've met some great kids who inevitably will end up on Good Morning America in a solid 15 years or so.  We try to make friends as best we can so they don't forget us in case they become the next Oprah.

And while this three-ring circus was going on, Sydney let me know that Square wasn't working at all.  As in not processing cards or opening the cash drawer.  When I finally called for assistance, they suggested I unhook the iPad with a torx screwdriver thingy.  And I basically ignored them because using a torx screwdriver isn't in my skill set.  An hour later, without touching it once with a torx screwdriver, Square was working perfectly.  (In the interim, we manually processed cards at 3.7% and made change the old-fashioned way...with our iPhone calculators.)

And when Jeanne rolled back in, she proclaimed she was more relaxed than she had ever been in her life.  And then she wanted to know if anything interesting happened while she was gone...