Who’s ready for a new year?
Come on, raise those hands!
I’m looking forward to great and marvelous and wonderful and abundant blessings this year, and one thing I want to work on is finding positive in everything, even things that make you go YUK!
This week brought changes at my store. I posted winter hours – still Tuesday through Saturday, but I will only be open one later night, Wednesdays (10am-6pm) , Tuesday, Thursday and Friday will be 930am-430pm. Saturday’s remain the same – 10am-3pm.
The reason? Mark found new employment! YAY!
How ironic - this week, last year (I’ll never ever forget) I was in our old kitchen with my mom rolling a huge pot of stuffed cabbage. It was around noon time and Mark walked in the back door. It was odd, because he NEVER had early days. We stared at him as if to say “Huh?” as he proceeded to tell us he’d been let go. Like a toilet flushing, thirty two years down the drain, just like that.
Now, flash forward a whole year, to the week, and he’s beginning a new career. I pray he takes off running, and is able to show what a great asset he can be – you’d be hard pressed to find a harder worker. He has been a huge help to me, getting my store up and running, and helping cook and clean and shuttle the kids around…. I’ll really miss that – but I am SO ready to see him go back to work, if ya know what I mean!
So, back to store hours… I need to make certain I pay attention to my kids right now. It’s easy to forget, when the store and its demands take over, but I have a family that desperately needs me. I think most will understand the ‘no working late most nights’ and if someone really has an urgency, I will make myself available by appointment. And there’s always Saturdays if the weekday hours are hard for you.
The Winter 2012 Workshop schedule is now posted as well. This month I will be hosting Drew Beninati to the studio where he’ll be teaching a two day Wall Finishes class featuring Textureline products (which I am now carrying, tint machine and all!)
I also just found out that the creator of Textureline products , Barry Affleck, will be joining us! If you have any interest in dressing up your walls this year, this is the workshop for you. Textureline offers a variety of easy to use decorative paint products, and you’ll also get built in support – moi!
The last Saturday of January I’ll be hosting an all day Get Your Paint On Workshop – bring in a piece of furniture you’re eager to refinish and do it here, with 7 others! Everything is included, instruction, tools, materials, lunch, drinks, F U N – we just need YOU and your piece! Space is limited, check your calendar, then give us a call 
What else? Well, I am in the process of switching over my bookkeeping program to Quickbooks (just shoot me now) AND I’m also working on getting a new laptop set up, since my old one is flickering and ready to implode.
Let’s just say it has been a week from H E L L - but I will remind myself that I need to work on seeing POSITIVE in all things, even yukky hellacious ones… (is that a word?) If I look or sound a little frazzled, it’s just temporary!
Orders have picked up – I can sense that homeowners are packing up the holidays, and looking to start some indoor paint projects. I sent my first order out last week to someone overseas – well, it got shipped to an APO address, but still, it continued on across the ocean The fun part was she called today, all the way from Germany! How cool is that?
She is painting an armoire and promised to send some photos along of the progress. This isn’t her photo, above – just one I admired as I googled ‘Germany’… Maybe I can get her to share a few of the area around where she lives.
Lastly, I want to mention that my focus the rest of this week will be catching up with emails I’ve received that require attention. I never delete emails, until I answer them, hopefully, that will be current by the weekend.
