I Might Be On Radio Silence For A While

Our Going Out of Business Sale opens to the public on Wednesday the 8th. We'll be closed for business after today, for three days of preparation - hanging signs, doing interviews with newspapers and other media outlets, and rearranging product to maximize visibility and, hopefully, sales. It's going to be some long days, and it will be exhausting, but I'm hoping it will be worth while at the end of it all. What I do know is that all three of us are working super hard to make this happen. (I found it highly amusing when Travis was questioning the valuation we had placed on some items, DH came back to him with direct quotations from Travis' own book to hold up his position. Go DH!- LOL)

I've got a bunch of signage - not just the huge "Going 
Out of Business" sign for the exterior, but also lots 
of window signs, and signs to hang from ropes that 
I'll string for overhead. I'll have to make sure that those 
signs don't interfere with our alarm system which 
works on infrared light connections. 

We spent yesterday fielding questions from customers who had received cards for our opening day, or who had heard we were closing and wanted to confirm (while buying beads, of course). We're rearranged product display boards, consolidated products into more visible areas, I photographed all of the signage we've got from Travis, and we're still exchanging emails with him regarding specific points of potential contention. I'll be checking his book today to double-check time frames for signage and other important things, like when new discount levels kick in, etc. 

The difficulty with any business is "What is the business 
actually worth? What's the valuation?" A lot of different 
factors go into that - the actual physical merchandise, the 
settings - showcases, etc - and the customer base loyalty. 
One of the things is the displays, and we know the value of 
our displays - we've researched it heavily. We can support 
our valuation, and support the discount levels we've placed 
on them by directly referring to what he actually said in 
his book. We quoted the paragraph to him verbatim. 

I'm warning all of you ahead of time, that my posts may be shorter than usual - just a quick check-in to say "I'm still here", and "I care about each of you, but just can't chat right now". LOL Oh and talking about "chatting", Aearwen, I'm not really sure if we'll have the opportunity for our Wednesday chats until after we've shut the store down at the end of May! That's a long time away, so we'll have to play things by ear, but I suspect I'll be at the shop six days a week for the next six weeks or so. 

We're going to be playing a lot of this by ear and by 
feel. DH wants more $ out of the business than I do, but 
he's my money man. I want the customers to be happy/sad. 
Happy for the bargains, but sad to see us go. And I 
want them to still check out the last deals as we get 
towards the end of May and final closing. 

The only real negative to all of this is my sciatica. That's not going away. A good massage or maybe a chiropractor might help, but that takes time that I just don't have. I might get in touch with my oldest niece - she's a licensed massage therapist and may have some recommendations for me. Aside from that, I'll just have to live with the discomfort and hope that it can work itself out. 

I just can't seem to shake my sciatica pain. It's primarily 
at the bottom of my ass - so sitting is uncomfortable, and 
standing is a bit better, but not my favorite since I have 
a lot of computer work to do which requires sitting in 
most cases. Even just driving to and from work is painful. 
SUCKS! LOL

So, I've blathered on long enough. I'll be back on Monday and Tuesday mornings, for sure, but then we open for our invitational event on Wednesday and it might just be a quick check-in to say "I'm still here" from that point onward. (Aearwen - no Wednesday phone call this week for sure, and I'll be playing it by ear from that point until the sale ends.) Enjoy your weekend and Slava Ukraini. 

A Tale of Snow, Winter, Spring and Life Lessons

It actually snowed last night! Our ground looks white. The roads look fine, I think it melted on contact with the roadways, but there are probably a few icy patches so I'll be cautious when driving. I'm going to leave tire tracks on my driveway - DH "gave me permission" to leave "bunny tracks" in the driveway and he'll shovel them up later today. This is a quick storm - in and out and then back to our crazy winter once more. But it's really nice to awaken to the supreme silence that snow can bring. 

There's a silence to snow - it's like Mother Nature took 
her down comforter and pulled it over her head - pushing 
the world and all of its' sounds out and leaving the 
peace of total silence unmarred. 

Have you ever experienced that blanket that Mother Nature places over the world with snow? It dulls sounds, mutes them into the song of the stars so that you can hear and feel the rhythms of the cosmos much easier. It pulls color away and shows the world in shades of grey - brown-grey, black-grey, and all shades in between. The colors of Winter are unlike any colors for any other season. Every color in the neutral spectrum is contained within a 24-hour after a deep snow. 

There's something very restful about the neutral 
colors of Winter after the color riots of the 
other three seasons. It allows the palette to 
delve deeper into thought, and the body to reset 
for the challenges that lie ahead. We haven't had 
much of a winter up here in the Frozen Northlands 
this year, so having these few inches of snow 
is a relief. (We should normally have had 35-40 inches 
of snow so far this year, and we've had NONE 
until yesterday). 

This, isn't a "deep snow", this is only a few inches, and it's not sticking to the roadways at all, just the lawns and driveways of the houses fronting the roads. This is a baby snow - but it's a welcome one. It's on the far side of Winter, and will soon be gone, but it served to remind us that this year has been an anomaly - that rare thing in the Frozen Northlands. We've had an almost snow-free winter, and that's as rare as hen's teeth - in other words, it really doesn't happen. 

Winters up here without snow are as rare as hen's 
teeth, and this year was turning into one of the driest 
winters of our history. I'm grateful to see a few inches 
of snow on the ground. We desperately need the moisture. 
But, if we dive into a deep freeze, we'll lose trees and 
other plants that have sprouted early, and some of the 
animals are also ahead of schedule with their young. 

Our plants will be happy for the moisture that a snow brings, but our trees and plants will be confused. We've had a rare Green Winter, and many of them have already formed buds. If we get a truly deep freeze, it will be very hard on the trees. But I think we'll be all right. We're actually heading into the time of year when we usually see the most snow. But this crazy winter ... well, who can tell? We'll just take it as we take life - one day at a time. I'm off to the pool, have a wonderful Thursday and I'll be back tomorrow. Slava Ukraini and חיים למען ישראל.