Pushin' back

It’s cold, wet, Monday and I’m sick! I have Amelia’s lurgy (as we call it around here – “the dreaded lurgy”) and have spent the greater part of the weekend coughing and lying around on the couch demanding that Big-P bring me cups of lemon grass and ginger tea (more an antiseptic than a tea but it does the trick).
Last night while in an evening sick-person delirium, I spoke to Special-k who had just returned home from a Marketing Conference in Hong-Kong. She had sent us an email a few days back saying;
“I am having a great time. It is soo great to be surrounded by people who have similar interests – people who care about statistics, attrition, retention, return on investment etc” and I wasn’t sure whether she was being sarcastic or not, but it turns out that she was dead serious. And she was pumped. There was marketing lingo zinging over the phone lines. So I broached the topic of my BIG PROJECT with her for her advice.

My big project is nothing as amazing as writing a children’s book (although that is still in the BIGGER PLAN – meaning life – which is being chipped away at slowly) or having another baby (good lawd!). It’s the idea to launch an online loobylu shop. I was trying to get it all organised to have a series of Christmas / Season’s Greetings cards ready but I have run out of time as these would really need to be up and going by October and I am still trying to find time to work on the designs let alone create a shop design, find some printers, apply for a merchant account at the bank and find some way of accepting credit cards over the web. I was going to go with Paypal but it introduced a whole other level of complications and I still haven’t even got two designs ready to go.

So Special-K asked me the tricky question “Have you written your business plan yet?” (Something she and I had discussed way back in April.) “Nooo…” I had to whine “I haven’t had time!”. She explained that she wasn’t hassling me, just letting me know that if I had done my business plan I probably would have discovered earlier on that an October launch date was not going to be viable… and I wouldn’t be feeling so guilty and hassled right now. Ahh! Sweet soothing words! So I’m not a failure! It’s just an impossible task for one person who only has two days a week to spare! She offered her services once I had got some ideas for a business plan down (“a weekend workshop”! How exciting! I’ll bring the croissants!) and I went to bed feeling relieved and excited again. So there it is, the Big Project. “Pushed back” as they say in the biz, but still happening.