My restaurant/coffee shop/antique store has now been open for two months. It has consumed such vast quantities of my time and energy that blogging and other “leisure” activities were put on the back burner, so to speak.

I had ordered a sign for my business back on January 2 but the sign company I used was a small one-man operation that turned out to be completely unreliable. After three months of insisting that he deliver our custom sign (which was already made, he simply couldn’t be bothered to come install it!), we were finally able to order another sign and have it installed.

Here is a photo of the front of our building now that we have our sign:

And there I am in the reflection of the window, taking this photo with my ipad in the glaring morning sunlight.

Spring has arrived fully this week. The trees are greening out and flowers are blooming everywhere. My brother informs me every day of the new birds that he has observed arriving back from their winter travels.

This is a wisteria bush on my property. I also have wisteria vines growing up through the trees in several places.

My favorite flowers, the daffodils have already bloomed and died. Someone needs to invent an ever-blooming daffodil.

When I can now in the mornings, I sit on the back porch in a rocking chair and have my coffee. It is a great way to start the day. I watch the sun rise over the hills and listen to all the birds of our forest.

My business has stayed extremely busy but I’ve gotten less exhausted from it all. I finally have enough people working in the kitchen (“fingers crossed”) so I don’t have to be in there every second of the day. Now I plan to concentrate on improving the coffee bar and smoothie area of the business as well as bring in more art to hang on the walls.

We completed week 2 of our business being open. It has been a wild and busy ride so far. And completely exhausting. I have been working so hard and so many hours and trying to juggle everything that I simply made myself sick. I haven’t really eaten anything in two weeks. And what I do eat seems to not stay with me long because my stomach is so upset. Apparently I have a bad case of nerves that really affects my stomach.

I finally went to the doctor on Friday and got some anti-nausea medicine to get me through this. I hate hate hate to take medicine but sometimes it is necessary. I have no idea where I’ve been getting my energy to work the 14-hour days I’ve been putting in.

The medicine is helping and I ate a small meal last night that actually stayed down in my stomach where it belonged. So far today, I have managed to eat a bowl of cereal. I’ve lost 12 pounds. And my clothes are rather hanging on me now. I may have to go shopping for some new clothes that fit!

But over-all it has been wonderful having this new business and figuring everything out. We have been just incredibly busy and have received such an outpouring of support from our community. We are only open four days a week but we could probably be open a couple of more days each week and still be just as busy. But for right now, until I get the staff fully trained and all the kinks worked out, then I will continue on our current schedule.

Last week was crazy. I worked around 90 hours including putting final touches on my coffee shop/cafe/antique store and then opened for business on Wednesday. It was flat-out busy from the moment we opened up which was hugely gratifying.

But I was still a bundle of raw nerves so I didn’t eat anything for 4 days. I’m not sure how I kept going but apparently Dr. Pepper was my energy source.

Then I caught an awful bad cold. So I’ve spent a couple of days trying to get some rest and recuperate. Since my business is only open Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of each week, I have had three days in which to work on resting and getting over this cold. I feel better today for the first time in a week.

Our new espresso machine finally arrived also. We have it installed and ready to go. Our espresso machine’s name is Gloria and I will post pictures soon!

Now we are waiting for the sign to be delivered and hung on the front of the building. I ordered the sign over two months ago. They delivered it while I was on vacation (which I had asked them not to do) and it was made too short. So they took it back to correct that and I haven’t been able to get them to come install it since then. They’ve given me every excuse in the book to keep stalling me and I am quite angry about the delays. I was really disappointed to open my business with a sign on the building and if I have to order another sign from another sign-maker, then it will be delayed even further.

So that is my past week in a nutshell: work, sleep, work some more!

I have been so flat-out busy getting my new business ready to open. Opening date is tentatively set for February 22. But it is going so much easier for me now that the new general manager I have hired has started work. Her name is Cindy and she is a list-maker like I am. She has hit the ground running so to speak, and is taking care of many things on our to-do lists. So perhaps my blog posting can get back to a regular schedule.

Yesterday was mostly a day at home that included laundry, a walk in the woods, and watching Downton Abbey on PBS.

Also, reading. I have some books on my Life Bucket List that I would like to read in my lifetime. One of those is the collected works of Jane Austen. Yes yes, I know. I should have read Jane Austen long ago. But I didn’t. I’ve seen a couple of live theater productions of Emma and Pride & Prejudice. So right now I am reading Sense and Sensibility. The first 6 pages or so were excruciatingly boring to me and I almost gave up. But I persevered and it is much better.

And on my walk yesterday I snapped another picture of the main creek on our property as the sun was starting to go down:

I just have to tell this story about my mom.

Last night the moon was full and she woke sometime during the middle of the night to find the moon shining fully into her bedroom window.

And she immediately spotted two Klu Klux Klan men outside her window. She clearly saw their white pointy hats in the moonlight and was very frightened.

Her first thought was: “Now what did Sam do?” (Sam is her husband.) Apparently she never knows what he will do next.

She was paralyzed with fear and trying to figure out how to get to her pistol which is stored somewhere in her room.

Her heart was pounding and her mind was racing over how to get away without the KKK men seeing her moving around in her room.

Finally, she calmed down and woke up fully.

And realized that the two” KKK men” in the window was actually the curtains on her window and the bright moonlight shining through made it look like those pointy KKK hats.

I went on vacation for awhile and finally just made it back to the office late this week. Every time I go on vacation I have perfectly good intentions of posting on this blog at least a few times. But then I get so caught up in my vacation and travelling that I simply don’t post. Sorry all!

We took our yearly vacation at Disney World in January. This time we stayed at the Beach Club resort again. We had stayed there last year and loved the location next to Epcot. Here is a view from our hotel balcony:

You can see the Boardwalk hotel and Swan hotel across the lake. The Beach Club has an actual sandy beach with sea gulls. I’m not sure how Disney convinced sea gulls to come that far inland and hang out at a fake beach but it sure contributed to the beach scenery.

As usual we simply exhausted ourselves at Disney World. We got up early and stayed up late. We walked miles. We ate good food and this time, we even made ample use of the fabulous hotel swimming pool which included a sandy bottom pool and fun!!! waterslide. The weather was sunny and quite warm the week we were there. My mom went with us this time. That is her first visit to Disney World since 1979. She loved it!

And yes, I will post a few vacation pictures this week once I get sort of caught up on a few things around here.

We have a few springs on our land which eventually form little streams. At some point they all meet up to form a small creek. Today Sidney and I took Max & Rocky along with my brother’s dog Ruby for a walk in the woods. We went down the old road until we got into a bottom area where a spring crosses the old road. Then we turned and walked a few yards to the larger stream. Here is the little spring that rushes down the hill:

 This little spring runs underground briefly past this fallen log and then emerges into a small pool before it goes back underground to meet up with the stream a few feet away. Here is the little pool it makes:

We climbed down the bank into the creek and walked for a little way. The water was icy cold but I couldn’t resist taking off my shoes and wading in it!

The dogs enjoyed cavorting in the shallow water. See those overhanging mossy areas above? Sometimes mink will have their burrows in there. When my dad was a kid growing up here, he said there were still bear dens along this stream and every once in awhile they would catch sight of one. Once when my dad and his friends were in high school and working on an old car in their shop building a bear actually wandered in to their open garage door. They all quickly jumped into the car they were working on and closed the doors. The only problem with that was the car was a complete project car and the floor and seats weren’t even installed back into the car. So their feet were standing right on the floor of the garage and if the bear had been enterprising and wanted to get them, all he would have to do was to crawl under the edge of the car. Luckily, the bear wandered away after a few tense minutes.

We’ve got the upstairs of my building cleaned out enough to assemble the basics for my office. Eventually we will need to repair the ceiling that is in poor shape due to years of water damage from roof leaks. But for right now, I have my desk and computer set up against the wall that borders the stairs. I elected to leave the old vintage wallpaper on the walls and simply hung a couple of prints from Ikea.

Note the lights hanging from the ceiling. My grandmother’s house had those same lights. There were no plug-ins in my grandmother’s house except on the light thing that hung from the ceiling. I believe that this upstairs room could have been used as living quarters a hundred years ago but not really used since then.

The wooden floors are just grand. I carefully oiled the floors with Danish oil. By hand. My arms ached for days! The front wall is made of brick with plaster over it.

My view out my office window of the main street here in Iuka:

The gazebo you see in the center of the photo is in a little park called Jaybird Park. During the spring and summer months there is a concert held in that gazebo each week. And farmer’s set up to sell their produce on Thursday mornings. At the far end of the street is City Hall, the police station, and fire station. The train tracks run alongside Jaybird park to the left.

The outside of my building currently looks like this:

The inside is a major mess although we have managed to get most of the heavy cleaning done on all three floors. The window you see in the photo above is the main floor. The four smaller windows above that is the upstairs where I will have my office. And on the lowest level, the basement opens out into the back alley behind this row of buildings in downtown.

The old Phillips Hardware sign is still visible on the building for now. My new sign will have to just sit on top of it. We didn’t want to paint over it because this is a historic building. It has been in the same family since it was built in the late 1800′s and has been a hardware store since it opened for business way back then. It only ceased to be a hardware store in March of 2011.

I would like to get something done to replace the aluminum awning that graces the front of the building but that may have to wait because we just discovered that the furnace/air-conditioning system for the main floor needs to be replaced. And it isn’t cheap! I still don’t know exactly how I am going to heat and cool my office area. There is currently no air-conditioner or heating of any kind on the upper floor.