Hello there, internet friends and creepys! *or is it creepies?

It is 10:36 am and I woke up at exactly 10:01 am with the urge to finally sit down and write something here. I am likely going to keep it short and sweet because….I have a lot of drafts sitting here that resulted from me starting to write and then just losing my mojo and abandoning it all together. I currently have a post called 2021 In Review sitting in my drafts folder, but I only got up to March before I jumped ship. Goal: finish writing it by 2022 😉

Anywho, things have been good lately! Besides snowstorm Filomena literlaly rocking our worlds last week (I nearly died of pressure, I swear- all of our employees called out yet none of our 25+ reservations called to cancel…funny how that works, isn’t it????)

I have been back at work for a couple of weeks since our little winter getaway and I am definitely just as tired as I was before the break, so I guess sleeping 12+ hours a night while on vacation doesn’t really make it any easier to come back to work.

But with that being said, things are going well at work and we seem to have figured out a way to lighten my load a bit (involves hiring a new person …actually one of our interns…) to go in earlier than I do to make the bagels and do the “dough shift” and I can arrive after 9 am. And then at the end of the day, we have someone else come at 5 and stay there alone until they leave around 8. We are opening on Tuesdays now, so really my only day OFF (meaning, not at the shop), is Monday. My plan was to also take Tuesdays off and leave other people there since it’s bound to be a light day, but we did that last week and my heart can just not handle paying someone to be there all day and to then earn less money than what we had to pay them. Not that my time is free, but it doesn’t feel as awful. We have also expanded our deliveries to Tuesday as well and we are completely booked for tomorrow, so if not a soul walks through the door all day, the deliveries will bring in some $$$. Completely aside: I am addited to this bagel—chive cream cheese, capers, cucumbers, jalapeños, fresh herbs.

Having time off really helped me to see everything with a fresh set of eyes. The day I got back to work, I realized the way we have been cutting the dough for the bagels has been wasting HOURS and I have not only come up with a way to shave about 45 minutes off of every 300 bagels rolled, but I have also come up with ways to streamline the process. We were this close to purchasing a very expensive machine that would divide the dough for us (manually), but my technique is just short of as quickly as this machine would have done it. So yay for me!

While I was home, I had the opportunity to work in a local bakery overnight and after that experience, I walked away with my head BUZZING with ideas. Schedule ideas, planning ideas, etc. But more than anything, I came away with the understanding that 1) we need to streamline what we do at work- to make everything run more smoothly and to make sure everyone knows where they are supposed to be. And 2) we can and should expect to get more out of our employees- so that is exactly what we have been doing. I’ll hopefully be able to share a little bit more in a future post.

Other than working, I haven’t been doing a whole lot of oh-so-fun things. It’s really difficult for me to find the energy to want to go do something “fun” after I have been on my feet for 12+ hours and then have to get back on my feet for another 12+ hours very soon. I told Luis last night that I do miss the days of having a weekend to look forward to. The “today is Thursday, which means tomorrow is Friday and then it’s the weekend! What should we do this weekend?!” feeling. My weekend is Monday (and currently half of Friday) and we all know that ain’t nothing fun happen on a Monday. And Friday…sure I can go home and watch tv, or go for a walk in the park, but I know myself and I will be sitting at home, planning for Saturday and Sunday. It’s just a part of the job, but that doesn’t make it easy.

One fun and novel thing we did? We ordered delivery for the first time EVER. Even growing up, I don’t remember my family having food delivered to our house often/ever. But UberEats snagged me in because I accidentally opened their food ordering app (I was actually trying to order an Uber…I am slightly addicted to using Uber and it is very bad for my wallet), but I opened the app and later that day they sent me a 20€ off coupon to try the app, so we used it to get 2 poke bowls for just 7€. But little do they know, they are the suckers because I will never order delivery without a 20€ off coupon 😉

Ok, time to get moving on my “day off”. Plan for the day:

• place orders with all suppliers
• organize our business budget and upload all invoices from last week (this is tedious but I love – probably a little too much – seeing how much money we earned. And no, we are not getting rich….
• organize my personal budget. I fell off the bandwagon with this about a year ago (when we opened the shop), but I have been trying to get back on. Admittedly, I am not very good at staying on track
• wash all laundry in the laundry mountain!
• refold and organize my closet which is a disaster
• empty out email inbox
• send thank you note!
• organize delivery routes for tomorrow
• make the plan for tomorrow
• cook some food for the week so we don’t starve to death. We ate eggs 4 nights of the week last week. Mom, please help!
• have drinks with two friends tonight