an update, courtesy of insomnia

It’s freezing in this apartment right now.

Or, maybe it’s not that cold, maybe I’m just cold. I’m always cold. We’re talking always. It frustrates the hell out of me.

I have been, lately, taking two steaming hot showers a day. Not full soaping up every time, necessarily, but standing under the hot water so it will warm up my blood. I think I’d live in the bathtub if we had one. (Next apartment WILL HAVE A BATHTUB. Period.)

And when I’m not showering, I’m sitting two feet from the space heater. Wearing a sweater, socks and a blanket. I’m, like, cold from the inside. I guess I sound like I’m complaining. I guess I am. I apologize.

I’m cold.

I’m also awake. It’s 3:18am and I tried to sleep a little over an hour ago, and couldn’t. I’ll go back in soon and give it another whirl. I’m in the thick of it, you guys, with this bakery. The numbers are swirling around in my mind. Quantities of sweets so large they’re hard to commit to memory, frankly. So I rely on charts and my own page-long, handwritten descriptions of corporate orders and shopping lists and post it notes. Kevin’s running errands, friends are coming over to help me bake, I’m trying to make the very best use of all my time. I think I might have to close the holiday shop down a couple days early!

An interesting personal side affect of all this is that my hair has never consistently looked worse. There’s no time.

It’s also super rewarding, though! All this business! I can’t believe this has happened!! I have no idea what will happen after the holiday rush is over. I’m not worried that we’ll do no business at all, but I know things will slow down.

To be honest? I’m looking very much forward to that.

It will be a great chance to check in with where we are, to take a look back over this present chaos and learn more about how to make it easier, make it more efficient, and to continue to grow things – assuming that’s what we decide to do.

A year ago, I started a blog about quitting my job to go do who knows what. I had no idea at the time. A couple months later, I was playing around with the idea of selling sweets with Faryn. A few months after that, Faryn and I were meeting at the nearby Mexican restaurant to discuss our goals. We’d been plugging along with our little bakery biz for most of the spring and now it was May and we finally said – Okay. We’re in this. And I said I wanted to be trying to do it full time by December. (December seemed so far away, at the time.) I’m not entirely sure I believed I would actually achieve that goal. I think I was just hoping the goal would create momentum for us. But here we are. Here we are!

I’m going to wake up tomorrow and run through a list of computer to do’s. I’m going to fit in some exercise. And then I’m going to start baking. I have a holiday party to attend in the evening, to which I will also be delivering one of our Party Samplers. And then I’m going to come home and go to sleep early to do it all over again. And so on until I leave town on December 19.

Yikes!!!

Fun, scary, strange, frustrating, exciting, rewarding, interesting, exhausting and inspiring. All at once. This life right now.

Night.