9-04 10-04 11-04 12-04 1-05 2-05 3-05 4-05 5-05 6-05 7-05 8-05 9-05 10-05 11-05 12-05 1-06 2-06 3-06
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"I tried to quit three times today." - Me
"That's it?!" -Sarah (co-worker)

Thursday, 1-25-24: Let's listen to ABC and talk about failed 80s movie remakes.
I was about to leave work Tuesday, and the 80s channel was on (because I put it on as usual hehehe.) I heard a song I didn't really know, but because I am such an 80s affectianado I figured it out pretty fast. Similar beat to When Smokey Sings. Gotta be ABC! No one knows the band ABC. I shouldn't say no one, but I guess .01% of the populace at best would know. ABC is a fucking awesome 80s band and if you disagree with me then I hate you. I probably hate you anyway, but I'll hate you a little more.

The song is called Be Near Me, and it rules. I love it when, in the year 2024, I can hear an 80s song I don't really know and add it to my mental database. I need to add them now because soon I'll be too old and I'll start forgetting songs. The video is great, too. It's really not a good video, but it represents the 1980s in epic fashion:

^All I wanna know is why? Why does he have a rope attached to his setup? Big hair, crazy set, lots of synthesizers, check. ABC has another great song that almost no one ever knows called How to be a Millionaire. I should listen to that one next!

I was on 411mania.com earlier, and in the Movies/TV section was an article about this upcoming epic failer-to-be:

^OMG WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?! WHAT A BUNCH OF CRAP!

I DO NOT WANT A REMAKE OF ROAD HOUSE, EVER. ESPECIALLY NOT WITH THE GUY FROM FUCKING DONNIE DARKO IN IT. THIS IS FUCKING BULLSSHIT AND I AM CERTAIN IT WILL BE TEN POUNDS OF SHIT STUFFED INTO A FIVE POUND BAG GODS DAMN IT.

You can't remake Road House successfully. It is impossible. The original is a piece of shit movie, but it's a cinematic masterpiece. No Swayze movie has ever been better because "Pain Don't Hurt" and "Be nice until it's time to not be nice" applies 100% of the time. Also, "Take the train" for the win. Even thought it's not really a good movie it's a GREAT movie, if that makes any sense at all. Easily in my all-time top 25.

I swear to the gods who do not exist I am going to fire someone at work one day and simply say "Take the train." Guy looks for memes about that epic Road House quote... Okay guy gave up because guy is one drink away from bivouacing and guy doesn't want to invest his precious... precious time on it.

ABC: When Smokey Sings. Another great song I shall listen to right now on my tinny bootleg Acer computer speakers as I write stupid crap that no one cares about. What a bunch of crap! I had to fire two people last week. One of them was in part responsible for this very lame and totally false one-star Google review:

"There's an ongoing gas leak at this establishment. It's been causing health issues for people who work there and customers."

OMG WHAT A FALSE BUNCH OF CRAP! That is not true at all gods damn it. We had a prep cook who was terrible so we hauled on her ass. She didn't post that review online, but we figured out who did and it's in her sphere of influence. The sad thing about this prep cook is the fact she used to be better, but she regressed for reasons beyond our control. We are decent to work for, but we can't keep everyone happy all the time. Her "friend" actually posted that before we fired her worthless ass so Kat and I went down there a week ago all fired up. I was going to throw her onto that proverbial train ASAP, but my awesome wife suggested that was unwise so I just called her the next day and told her she was terminated. She was bad at her job so that wasn't even the reason she got canned.

Okay, we transition from ABC to Pet Shop Boys. I didn't ask for this, but it's a win so thank you, YouTube. What Have I Done to Deserve This? FUCKING AWESOME SONG. Again, if you disagree with me then I hate you. I probably hate you anyway, but I'll hate you a little more. I can see the comparison between ABC and the Pet Shop Boys. All I wanna know is why? Why are they the Pet Shop Boys? Did they once sell turtles? Maybe they sold Cuff and Link to Stallone in Rocky? Hehehe.

What song is better by the Pet Shop Boys? What Have I Done to Deserve This? or West End Girls? They both win, and I can't decide.

Sales are great at the bar tonight, and I haven't had to go down to help work for the first Thursday in a while because we added a server. We're looking at double what we did on Thursday a year ago. DOUBLE. Of course that's only one day, but the trend is up all month and by a lot. Tuesday was hot garbage, yesterday was decent before sleet and freezing rain shut us down an hour early (no worries it was actually a win) and today is fantastic. I had one tax client today, one yesterday, and one Tuesday so that's 3 done out of maybe 150. The first three have been easy; more complicated ones are coming. More difficult ones = more precious... precious money. However, it also means bye bye precious... precious time.

I was wasted like Doc-J and 8-Ball from Full Metal Jacket Sunday and into half of Monday (due to so much work), but my aging body bounced back nicely so I've been able to use the gym some, do yoga, and go for a sad but effective 1.5-mile jog on the treadmill this week. Too bad we're pwned for the rest of the week, and I don't think I'll get any more exercise. I'll get plenty of steps working at the restaurant, but it will be a lot of work. A LOT. Our Saturday dishwasher texted me 1.5 hours ago that he has COVID so that sucks a bag of rotting ass. We will be BUSY Saturday so no daytime dishwasher will really be a bunch of crap.

Hey more Pet Shop Boys. A song called Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money.)

"I've got the brains you've got the looks let's make lots of money." That's a lyric in the song, and it's hilarious. I love it! It would apply to our real life running this restaurant of ours, but my awesome wife got both the looks and the brains so that leaves my loser-ass with little else to offer hehehe. I should have more brains, but I stopped making good decisions a long time ago. What a bunch of crap!

THIS SONG IS AWESOME! The video is even better! Man I miss the 80s I am alive in the wrong time gods damn it. I know I was alive in the 80s, but I was ages 5-15 so does that really count? Pole Position, The Goonies, Knight Rider, Super Mario Brothers, kickball, ice skating, Bases Loaded, the best years are over. Mom and Dad literally rang a bell to get us in for supper because we played outside a lot when we weren't playing NES and watching cool movies like Rambo and Commando.

Nostalgia for the win tonight.

Oh, even better than that YouTube for the win playing Tina Turner We Don't Need Another Hero from the epic and masterful 1985 movie Mad Max: Beyond ThunderDome. Who runs Batertown? Hehehehe.

A final 1980s gif before it's time to bivouac:

My life still sucks as compared to how it was in the past, but I do think it's slowly getting better. 2024 hasn't been a disaster so far. I think we're on the cusp of making some money over the next three months so that will alleviate a lot of my stress. I fuckin' hate losing money. It's a bunch of crap!

Oh hey, a final goodbye song is by Emerson, Lake, and Powell called Touch and Go. Another great one.

Goonies never say die!

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Wednesday, 1-24-24: I kinda like this early-week schedule.
I used to work Tuesday afternoon/nights at the restaurant when we had karaoke Tuesdays, but we switched karaoke from Tuesdays to Wednesdays several weeks ago so now I work Wednesdays with Tuesday nights off. So far I like it! Sadly business on Tuesdays is ten pounds of crap stuffed into a five pound bag most weeks. Lat night we did about $360 in sales for the entire day. OMG WHAT A BUNCH OF CRAP! Thankfully I did take an event-room payment for a big party this Friday so the overall revenue was higher, but we still didn't even come close to hitting $1000 for the day.

^Our restaurant on Tuesdays 80% of the time, maybe more.

Last week was a perfect confulence of events for our business, and we got crushed. Heavy snow Tuesday evening gave us a reason to just stay closed for the day, and the weather was good for the rest of the week. We were busy all five days we were open, Wed-Sun (our week is Monday-Sunday) and we set our all-time sales high for January for the second consecutive week. We beat it by a lot, too. I don't think we'll hit the same number this week, but I still think it will be good because we have that big party Friday, two decent-sized events Saturday, and a few big-top reservations on the calendar.

The forecast for the rest of this week has a few problem-areas. Tonight there's a Winter Weather Advisory for 1" of snow and then some ice, but it's not starting until 1900 or later so we might still eke out a decent dinner. Trivia starts at 1900 so that might hurt us some. Thankfully tomorrow will be really nice, 44 degrees with no snow, ice, or rain. Oh Jesus, hell ya! 44 degrees in the dead middle of winter is a huge win. Sadly Friday looks like 1-3" of snow so that might hurt some. Weekend looks ok... for now.

I like having Tuesday evening off and not needing to work Wednesday until 1500. I was able to hang out at the house this morning; it's 1000 now and I just finished yoga. Before then I vacuumed, did dishes, mopped, scooped the dog shit out back, etc. Our friggin' dogs eat their own and each other's crap out there, especially this time of year when the poop becomes "Poopsicles." Groot will sometimes bring a frozen turd with her into the house.

WHAT A BUNCH OF CRAP!

I hate having pets nearly 50% of the time these days. I don't have time for that shit when I have a tax business and a restaurant to run. All I wanna know is why? Why do they eat shit? They will eat a turd but they won't eat a grape or a carrot. As much as I despise most of the cats living in this house at least they don't eat their own poop. Gods damn it!

I had my first tax client yesterday, easy one single only a w2, and I have one today and one tomorrow. Both of the two to come should be very easy, and next week I'll have more. It's going to be a tough balance, harder than ever this year, with the restaurant continuing to grow so rapidly. In theory we can schedule me down to only 2-3 days a week as manager-on-duty during tax season, but in reality it's not so simple. People call out, people take time off, vacations, etc. We have a pretty good staff right now, especially after I fired two of our weak links last week, but they can only do so much when we're packed full. Saturday we got crushed, total annihilation most of the day, and it was a long day.

All three days last weekend Friday through Sunday were LONG days. I was so beat on Sunday afternoon that a Red Bull energy drink didn't even work. What a bunch of crap! I rarely drink that crap, but I do use "Mio" caffiene additive to my bottled water. I don't use a lot of it, but it helps. I still felt beat into Monday morning, too. I'm good-to-go now until the weekend hits once again and we have to work 35-40 hours in 3 days.

Alright turds, all two of you who read this bootleg shitpile, I'm gonna go downstairs and use the treadmill for a mile or two. I've only used that thing once all year, and for only one mile. My cardio sucks! I just have a hard time running these days. I think part of it is older age and my post-Covid overall well-being and the other part of it is how much I walk when I'm working at the restaurant. I bet on event days I put a couple miles on each shift, no joke. I only weigh 140 right now so I'm obviously still burning off every single things that I eat. In years past before the restaurant I'd weigh 150-155 this time of year. Wow, what a difference!

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Thursday, 1-18-24: Tallied up the 2023 data...mostly.
I've been working on the restaurant sales and expenses data for 2023. In the past couple years I had Phil sort it for me since he's very good with Excel, the program I've used for seemingly forever to keep track of all my stuff. Rental properties, tax business, carpentry, exercise, you name it, I have a spreadsheet somewhere for it.

This year I decided to sort-of figure it out for myself. I can't make macros and fancy stuff like that, but I did figure out (with some online tutorial help) how to sort the data in a way that doesn't take me a friggin' year to add it all up. I should have learned this 20 years ago. What a bunch of crap! I used to take quite a while adding up all the rental properties incomes and expenses each year, and there's a much easier way to do it.

Some of the data I've mined so far is really interesting and, dare I say, encouraging. I can compare 2022 to 2023 (won't bother with 2021 since that was our first year and not a full year.) and some key numbers stand out. First, in 2022 our product cost was about 36% of our net sales. Not great. That does include supplies like trash bags, cleaning products, disposable gloves, toilet paper, etc. In 2023 we dropped down to 35% so that's still not very good. We need to be below 33, and really being below 30 would be fantastic. Nevertheless it is still an improvement.

The biggest area where we vastly improved was in labor costs. We dropped all the way down from a staggering and kind-of embarassing 47.8% in 2022 to 40.5% last year. That number does include payroll taxes, payroll fees, and worker's comp insurance. I love the 7.3% improvement, but I didn't clock in at all in 2023 and neither did my awesome wife so really that number is still a bunch of crap! We need to get that down to 33% or less as well, but I don't think we can do that until 2025 or 2026. Hell, maybe never.

The labor costs are certainly the main reason why we haven't made any money yet from the restaurant. Not one dime of profit. What a bunch of crap! Oh well, it takes 3-5 years they say and our 3-year anniversary is two months away. This year we need to get labor down into the mid 30s. Can we? We're heading in the right direction, and if we increase sales by another 112,000 like we did last year we'll be there.

That's the biggest way to offset labor costs. More sales. We're not always busy, but we have to be able to handle things when it does get busy. Sometimes we can predict and staff for busy periods that are almost always busy each week, but other times it's not busy when we think it will be busy and it's really busy when we're not expecting it.

We did make some changes last month that will help with labor costs. We were too heavy on the daytime janitorial/maintenance costs each week so we cleaned that up some. We also cut some in a couple other areas, and right now we've identified another area where we're wasting too much precious... precious money on labor in the kitchen so that will *hopefully* get handled in the next couple weeks. We have a couple people on the staff who are fairly bad at their jobs so they gotta step up or step out.

My goal for sales for the year is 1.1 million dollars. Last year my goal was a million, and thanks to a very strong December we came damn close. However, we still lost money because we spent over a million. $1,073,000. WHAT A BUNCH OF CRAP! We can't lose $75-80k again this year because we don't have it. Breaking even isn't an option either because we have our own bills to pay.

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Wednesday, 1-17-24: I should just pay for plowing.
We got 5" of snow yesterday afternoon/evening. It's not a lot, but it's more than we've gotten in one single storm so far this winter, or so it seems. It hit hard for only a few hours, but the worst of it was late PM into what would have been the dinner hours if we had opened the restaurant. We decided just to close for the day since Tuesday is our slowest day; we almost always lose money on a Tuesday and we have to make up for it later in the week. What a bunch of crap!

The snow ended last night before we bivouaced so I decided to shovel some and snowblow. The snowblower started, but it stalled before I could even get it to move from its parking spot. Gods damn it! I've had trouble with that friggin' thing. A lot. I didn't get frustrated, I just quit for the night, no problem. Now it's morning, a cold but beautiful winter morning, and the bootleg thing won't start at all. WHAT A BUNCH OF CRAP!

I know plow people so I should just pay to have our driveway plowed. Oh wait, we need extra precious... precious money for that. We don't have a huge driveway, but it would still probably cost $40 a plow so a few hundred each winter. Is that worth it? Once we have money again it certainly is! Fucking snowblower. I enjoy snowblowing when it's not horrible outside and WHEN THE FUCKING THING ACTUALLY WORKS. Sadly a lot of the storms we get aren't so easy to snowblow. Often times it's wicked cold and the wind blows the snow all over my scrawny ass. Other times it's a heavy, wet snow mixing with or changing to rain and you can forget snowblowing that bullshit.

In conclusion, SNOWBLOWING SUCKS WORSE THAN TRYING TO STUFF TEN POUNDS OF SHIT INTO A FIVE POUND BAG.

^My worthless snowblower is as worthless as that disgusting fatbody in that photo.

I'll just leave the snow at the end of our driveway and we can drive over it. Maybe by February it will melt some, and if not on well sucks to be us. I can shovel it, but F that I won't do that all at once.

At least the dogs really enjoy the fresh snow:

^Tiger Lily rolls around in it quite often. Groot does as well, but Tiger Lily really goes for it. I do enjoy watching them play in the snow.

In news that's not so depressing and wintery, we had our best ever January week of sales last week at the restaurant, and by a lot. We blew our old best out of the water by $3000. Oh Jesus, hell ya! This week and next week have the same potential, but it will depend on the usual factors. A restaurant near us was closed all last week so that probably helped us some, but it's closed every year in the winter for a week or more. We did lose yesterday by being closed, but we can easily make that up and even it we can't make it up we still saved precious... precious money on payroll and product costs. We surely would have spent more on labor and product yesterday than we would have taken it for revenue so I'm glad we didn't open at all.

Alright turds, all two of you who read this bootleg site, I'm gonna do yoga then go down to the restaurant for a bit. I'm not in a hurry this morning because I work all evening/night. This is also the last week for 3 months where I won't have any tax clients. I have a couple on the schedule for next week already, and more are sure to come.

Fuck off, winter. The end.

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Sunday, 1-14-24: The few remaining "days off" until later in April.
Today was almost one of my last remaining "days off" for the rest of winter and into early spring after tax season. However, I'll work this evening and tonight for about 7 hours since we had a call-out. What a bunch of crap! Oh well, it saves on labor and I have the precious... precious time to spare for it. I was planning to go work for about an hour anyway to transition the event room from our usual "Country Jam" to a private birthday party.

Tomorrow should mostly be a day off for my loser-ass as well; it's Martin Luther King Jr. day and the restaurant is closed Mondays so I'll take a trip down to the ol' homestead to visit Mom and Dad first then Jason, Holly, and the kids after before I head back home. I'll only be in the midcoast for about 4-5 hours total, but with the driving it'll be 7-8. I might work some tomorrow before I head out, but it all depends on when I roll my ass out of the rack since I won't get to sleep until later tonight. Once I get out of work around 2200 it will take at least an hour for me to be able to bivouac.

The IRS opens for tax processing on the 29th of this month, and my first appointment is the 25th. I can meet with clients and get their stuff all ready to go before the IRS opens for e-filing. I've blacked out the 26th-28th for tax clients because we have a lot going on at the restaurant that weekend. We have a lot going on next weekend as well. Things will be busy as long as big storms hold off and don't hit on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Thankfully no big storms expected, and the one we got yesterday wasn't bad at all for us. It did hurt daytime sales a bit, but we made up for it last night.

It could have been a lot worse. 2" of snow then rain then nothing and not really cold at all. The photo above is Lincolnville, a town I would be driving through tomorrow to get down to Warren. Maybe I'll be taking the back way up through Appleton Ridge. The winds were fierce and there was an astronomical high tide so the coast got crushed yesterday. That submerged road is Route 1. What a bunch of crap!

I have to scoot my loser-ass into work soon. It's been busy there today, but I did get some precious... precious free time earlier to do yoga, lose to Mike at racquetball, and now to update this bootleg site that only two people will ever read. Sales have been GREAT this week, and every single day of the 6 we'll have been open sales have exceeded what they were at this time last year. We will have our best January week ever as far as sales, and by probably $3000. That's a huge increase. Oh Jesus, hell ya! We need it because we have some bills piling up that we can take care of thanks to such a good week of sales. We actually have a chance to do just as well for the next couple weeks, assuming the weather cooperates. There is a snow event looming for later Tuesday, but it's still unclear how much of an impact that one will have. Getting snow on a Tuesday = no worries as it's our slowest day of the week anyway.

The NFL playoff games are happening this week, wld-card first-round games. The Patriots? Nope, not even close. One of the worst teams in the NFL this year ending with a 4-13 record. What a bunch of crap! Bill Belickeck, coach for 24 years, either got fired or resigned and I'm cool with that because it was time. He had an amazing run with all those fantastic Tom Brady years. Now they need a new QB and some other key pieces on the team. I might watch some of the Lions-Rams game tonight after work, but that's a game I don't really give a crap about.

Oh well, at least the Celtics and Bruins are having good seasons!

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Thursday, 1-11-24: More damaging weather.
These massive gods damned coastal storm with their stupid fucking 60-70MPH southeast winds with inches of rain... they're gonna make me want to leave Maine forever if we keep getting them this often. Two last month, one yesterday, and another one coming Saturday. The first one last month caused flooding in our cellar, the second one last month cost us thousands of dollars in lost product and two days of operating the restaurant when we didn't have power for 56 consecutive hours. What a bunch of crap!

Yesterday's storm? This was the scene in and around the dish area yesterday morning:

^NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Water was just pissing in from a hole somewhere on the roof. It's a flat rubber roof so finding a leaky spot from above is akin to looking for a needle in a haystack. The water can get under the rubber membrane and travel quite far from the actual leak before it enters our leased area. Gods damn it!

Our roof has been good lately with only a slow drip during heavy rains, and in the middle of the back hall in the first photo. No problem, bucket sits there for a few hours, all good. Sadly yesterday's powerful and destructive storm started off with a few incles of heavy, wet snow at night before turning to rain in the wee hours of the morning. We woke up thinking we'd lose power with high winds of 60MPH expected from 0500-1000. Bangor recorded a 58MPH, but we didn't lose power until around 1000. I thought the storm was over when the lights went out. What a bunch of crap!

Before the power outage I got my loser-ass on the roof with a shovel becuse I knew exactly what the problem was and how to solve it. When we get a sizeable coating of snow that then turns to heavy, pounding rain the roof turns to slush and the excess water can't get to the roof drains. Our roof is a bootleg turd anyway, but when it's clear of snow it runs off how it should. Unfortunately that snow clogs everything up. It only took about 15 minutes to clear things up well enough, but it was still windy and raining. A wind gust almost blew my scrappy ass over, but I was in no danger of falling off because we do have an interior hatch access and it's a flat roof. I was nowhere near the edge. Nevertheless falling into all that slush would have sucked. A lot.

It took quite a while to deal with the water mess and then we didn't have power, but thankfully this outage only lasted about 45 minutes to an hour. We had one wet celing tile in the restaurant itself so I needed to paint a spare. I had one painted, but not well enough because you need a sprayer to get all the little indents in the tile filled in. Our sprayer is on its last legs so I just went to Lowe's to buy a cheap, new one so I could do a few tiles. Bye bye most of the day for that horse-shit, and then I had to work 1530-midnight. I started off as maager on duty until our dishwasher tapped out due to her personal life drama so I ended as the dishwasher. Thankfully Katherine came down to help so I could get out of there at midnight instead of 0100.

Yesterday gets my fail-trophy:

^AWARDED TO JANUARY 10, 2024. GOOD RIDDANCE TO THAT TOILET-BOWL OF A DATE.

These friggin' storms are really threatening our relatively new business. We haven't even been open for 3 years and we've had four massive storm issues that I can recall. Hell, maybe 5 or 6. We lost revenue once a couple years back on a Saturday night when we were very busy and the power went out. Can't cash people up, can't make any more money, epic fail. Then about 15 months ago was this that almost ended us:

That was just before a big Halloween event in the banquet room, and we were so upset we almost just closed. Plus at that point in time we were losing about $10,000 a month. What a bunch of crap!

Just over a year ago we had a massive storm kill the power for about 20 hours and we lost an entire Friday night of sales including what would have been a nice event in that banquet room. That one set us back a few thousand dollars as well. Then of course last month was costly, and yesterdays was almost like a final nail in a coffin. It didn't cost us a whole lot of actual money (extra dish detergent for all the clean dishes needing to be washed) but it was the precious.... precious time suck that really hurts.

We need a generator.

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Thursday, 1-04-24: Happy New Year, chumps (all two of you who read this bootleg site.)
My friggin' back is sore. What a bunch of crap! I skipped using my little but effective cellar gym for the last couple weeks of 2023 for two reasons. First the damn thing flooded mid-month last month. What a bunch of crap that was! Two massive rain and wind storms really pwned our area last month. Second, I wasn't feeling too well for most of the last 1.5 weeks. I wasn't totally sick, but I was sort-of in limbo fighting something off. The kids got really sick, and Dan and Dillon missed a lot of work and school from it. My awesome wife was also really sick, and so were a few other people we know. Was it the 'rona? Hard telling not knowing when we don't have any more COVID test kits and when Walmart was sold out. Oh well, best not to know, right?

Losing both Dan (kitchen) and Dillon (daytime manager) Sunday at work hit us pretty hard, but we powered on through. Kat and I both worked 18 hours, give or take, on New Year's eve day a few days ago. What a bunch of crap! We were spread thin for staff earlier in the day and fairly busy, but by nightfall we were PACKED. We ended up setting our all-time daily sales record by just a tad over what we did on St. Patrick's Day just over 9 months ago. However, it was a lot of work. A LOT. It was a great way to finish December, and we set our all-time monthly sales record last month as a result of having such a great New Year's eve. Did it give us enough precious... precious money in the bank to keep the place afloat through the winter? Too soon to know.

I stopped making New Year's resolutions because they mostly fail. I have goals every year that reset, but I wouldn't call those resolutions. Normally I try to take a rest from the gym at the end of a year, at least a little, so I can get back into the groove as a new year begins. This time around is no different. I lifted some weights today, a very light workout, and I felt a little pull in my lower back when I was starting deadlifts so I switched to a couple other exercises before I quit. Now, several hours later, my back is still sore. What a bunch of crap! Hopefully I can sleep it off and it's no big deal because I don't want to have a nagging back injury stopping me from getting exercise. I've never had back issues so it's probably nothing. Maybe? Hopefully! All the years of blueberry raking should have helped make my back more... durable. Too bad I don't really know that and it's all just wishful thinking.

So far sales are a little better than they were at this time last year, and this is usually one of the slowest weeks of the year for us. We increases sales over 12% from 2022 to 2023 so if we do that again we're probably actually making money. A 12% increase might not seem like much, but it's $111,000 more over the course of an entire year. Wow! If we can do that one more time this year, even a 10% increase, I'll be very pleased. The event calendar is almost full already for the rest of this month so that's really encouraging. Too bad a couple or three winter storms are looming for the next 10 days so that could cause issues. Big snow = BAD FOR BUSINESS DO NOT WANT. There's a big coastal storm coming for Sunday, but it might go out to sea and only graze us.

I was hoping to find time to work on our cellar before tax season starts to eat my soul, but I don't think I'll be able to until the spring. I did take 540 lbs of flooring and other debris to the dump today on what was a surprisingly nice day for almost mid-winter. I think we hit 40 degrees earlier. Oh Jesus, hell ya! Down to about 15 now with wind chill near zero. The cellar looked like this the day after it flooded a few weeks ago:

^WHAT A BUNCH OF CRAP!

I do have the gym back together, but the floor needs a nice epoxy and I could reorganize a few things. Plus I never ripped up the old flooring under the squat cage because I didn't want to move it. Plus work was really busy so I didn't have a lot of extra time.

This is an unusual Thursday because both my awesome wife and I are home. Usually she works as the karaoke DJ Thursday nights, but she had Amanda cover it tonight and she's already asleep. I felt tired enough to bivouac an hour ago, but I'm staying up a bit longer just in case I'm needed at work. Things aren't too busy there so they appear to have it under control. Closing time is 0100 unless it's dead and no one's there. I'll try to rack out in about 30-45 minutes, between 2300-2330, and I'm hoping for a good night sleep since I work 12+ hours tomorrow. I don't mind doing that for now because it saves on payroll, but in a few weeks I'll have tax clients looking me up and I'll have to focus more on that. I've already scheduled 3 tax clients for later this month and into later winter. I'd like to fire half my tax clients this season, but we need the money so I'll power through.