— okay, a lot frenetic. I typically try to keep my committed work weeks down to about 30 hours / week right now — that’s the time that I have to put in for teaching, prep, grading, school board work, SLF work. It doesn’t count writing or crafting time; that flexes as I have energy and mental space for it.
This week was a bit of a perfect storm — we had a school board retreat, which added at least 10 hours to the week, we had Homecoming (which involved a bunch of extra driving of Kavi around, shopping for accessories, getting food, hosting her friends for the after-party), Anand’s 14th birthday (a bunch of supervising children, getting food, party set-up and clean-up)…
…and then this Berwyn Sprout incubator opportunity kind of dropped in my lap, and while I *could* have pushed it off and said I wouldn’t be able to take a spot until November, I suspect that means I would’ve lost the prime front window spot they were offering me, which seemed a shame, and also lost some of the run-up to Christmas. If I’m going to test out a store concept — I’ve been wanting to open a store for basically FOREVER, but it just didn’t seem logistically feasible — being able to do it Oct – Dec is pretty perfect.
So, a scramble, and my work hours this week skyrocketed to more like 90 hours or so, all complicated by the fact that I’m actually leaving town early tomorrow (Thursday) to go help my father with some eldercare finance stuff (I have a four-hour meeting with an accountant on Friday, whee), and won’t be back ’til Sunday.
All of which means the store is basically going to be ‘open’ starting today — I’m going down from 11-2 to put all the stock I can into the system, so it can be purchased (which involves sticking labels on everything). But I imagine I’ll do quite a bit of tweaking over the next few weeks, and won’t do anything like a ‘launch,’ until early November, I imagine. It’ll take a while before I’m happy with how it all looks — I have a vision in my head, but there will likely be much rearranging.
That said — I painted from 3-5 yesterday, and then Kevin joined me, and we painted some more (the darker colors needed three coats not to look streaky), and I really like the ombré effect, and the store manager loved it, so that was nice. 
Feels modern and fun and the greens mesh with the Sprout branding colors too, which is accidental, but nice!
Next step is taking down the painter’s tape and putting up shelving.
*****
Berwyn Sprout Small Business Incubator
7129 Cermak Rd, Berwyn
Tuesday – Saturday from 10am-8pm
Sunday from 10am-5pm
