What the Heck Happened to Tuesday Blog Time?

Hello, I'm not dead yet. 

I can possibly even dance and sing. I can definitely do a highland fling. Just not right now, I'd spill my tea. 

It all just got a bit heavy-going, and something had to give. Tuesday Blog Time gave. Just for a few weeks. 

Sorry 'bout that. 

Normal service will, at some point, be resumed. At which point we'll gradually get caught up with all the water that has flooded under the bridge in the last couple of weeks, whilst I have been hiding. 

These might be our wedding-planning notebooks.  Turns out we know a lot of people. 

Turns out I probably do too many things to just be one person. Or possibly it's a number of things a different person might be able to get a handle on? But it's too many things for just this one person. Things might calm down again soon, but I doubt it somehow. I just like to do the things. It might just actually be impossible to reconcile my fear of missing out and excitement about shiny exciting things and desire to be good at stuff with some fairly introverted tendencies and my need to charge up my internal batteries. Energy In is not keeping pace with Energy Out right now. 

We hid in a coffee shop in Edinburgh whilst waiting for our tent to get home. I had to have extra tea to make it all be ok again. 

In the last 9 days we have seen both sets of parents, all but one sibling, and thousands of associated children. Family points to us!

We even managed to discuss, with all the relevant parents, if rather briefly, the matter of a certain wedding. All parental parties are being polite, if not overly enthusiastic. Some time I will write about this past weekend, in which I played the role of Elephant In The Room, at a family gathering with the future in-laws.

Last weekend I was in Hertfordshire, attempting to tire out children who have far more stamina than me. 

The weekend before that I was in Aberfeldy and Pitlochry and up Schiehallion. Drinking single malt at the top with a drunken friendly stranger called Stevie. Hey Stevie!

The weekend before that I was in Aviemore, pitchin' tents and pickin' mushrooms. Also in Edinburgh. 

The weekend before that I was in Airdrie and East Kilbride, tenting and pedaloe-ing and chillin' in a Premier Inn in our pants.

The weekend before that I was, well, I was actually in the office, putting in the unpaid overtime that I might eventually get back.

Before that we were actually camping ourselves, and I might have drunk too much gin and fizz. 

Half way back down Schiehallion.

Next weekend we're going to Comrie. 

Then some time this month there's a jaunt to Alton Towers on the cards. 

There's a picture forming here, right? My house could turn in to a pumpkin on Saturdays for all I know. 

Between that my work project has Gone Live, 12 thousand students are registered and it wasn't a total disaster. All 3 dance classes that I've gone and gotten involved in have kicked off again. One of them is an actual proper teaching gig and everything. I sent some money to France - I'm disproportionately proud of that one, tbh.

 

Business Update Time

New Month Stock Take Time. Things are more real when there are numbers to go with them. 

Both my day job and my little business venture are just about reaching "peak crazy". Clever planning, huh? So I went signed up for an online course. My Mother thinks I'm avoiding her, but I'm really not. I just haven't been particularly "connected" for a while. 

My job at the moment involves getting all of the Undergraduate and Taught Postgraduate student population through a boring computer system thing. Well, we can't all be rockstars. Yawn. We have a bit of flipchart paper stuck on a wall with what would be called a "totaliser" if this was kids' TV on it. Like a Church-roof-fund thermometer. Every day my boss colours a bit of it in and other people um and ah at it. A decent fraction has been coloured in thus far, but man, do people care about that number. I'm surrounded by adults who have a very real obsession with arbitrary numerical milestones. On a fairly regular basis someone who gets paid a lot more than me will swing by the office and ask us for the most recent tally. Then whatever the number is, they'll do some mental rounding-up and want to be informed when we reach the next round number-zero-zero figure. Maybe I should start a tally of how many times we get asked for a tally? Then when it reaches a round number they might stop asking for fear of spoiling that nice round number. the x-thousandth student is more important than the x-thousand-and-1st.

People like nice pretty numbers, is what I'm taking from this. So this is going to be a post about numbers, so there. 

Businesses do that too. Except they've all but stopped because now if someone contacts you and tells you you're the millionth customer and you've won a prize, you'd stick it straight in the spam folder or the recycling. I thought about doing something to mark this little blog's 10,000th page view, but then I got distracte

Want people to read your blog - get engaged. Although that might not work every week. 

Wedding planning to date, still nil. 

But don't worry, I'm totally up to date with progress on the GBBO and I've read the last (sniff) Terry Pratchett novel already. Totally going to read it all again. immediately.

I didn't know you could miss someone you'd never even met. 

We are now in to our 6th month of hiring out bell tents. That's very exciting. Our little rowantreetents@... inbox has been pretty steady, so we have invented our own very simple 3-way filing system. Everyone gets a label and a folder (because I can't quite figure out the difference), and those are sub-divided: Active (both confirmed and not)/Completed/Never Happened. 

So far the stats are:

Completed: 8 bookings
Never Happened: 12
Active for 2015: 5 definite, 1 maybe
Enquiries for 2016(!): 2

If we count up all of the bookings that have happened so far, plus the ones that are in the diary for the rest of the year, then our little tents will have spent 70 nights out in the wild (between the 3 of them) this year!

High-tech, all the way.

So have we learned anything at all about this tent hire malarkey. Maybe. Maybe one or to things. Here's some bullet points.

• We're probably undercharging, at least for some items. A customer told us so. 2016's prices will see some revision, and will be a closer representation of the effort-cost that goes in to each item. That's going on the "Winter jobs" list. 

• It can be done. 1 person can set up a tent, candles, bunting, lighting, pump up and make beds for 4 in an hour. Most of that is spend swearing at airbeds. Taking it all down again took 2 of us the same time, strangely enough. 

And I took some awesome step-by-step pictures of it on my phone on Thursday, just before the phone packed up so completely it's had to be sent back to the manufacturer.

• Our car's quite small, but usually just big enough. We're looking in to a roof box or a small trailer, and also in to the cost-effectiveness of budgeting for a handful of 24-hour van-hires per year. 

• We have managed to keep work-work and tent-work really quite separate. L's 90% contract means she does a lot of tent-based stuff on her Friday afternoons off. I'm rather envious. 

• There is a niche, and there is demand for it to be filled. A handful of other people are trying to fill it too, so we've probably got some way to go in identifying the exact niche we're looking at.

• People have found us. God knows how. Our efforts at Marketing have been limited at best. So google seems to be working for us. A google search on "tent hire Scotland" sees us about 2 thirds of the way down the first page. If that's the same for the rest of you then I'm pretty happy at that.

• There is very limited time for incorporating new stuff mid-season. We recently bought a porch/awning type thing. We've even had paying customers use it, but you won't see it on the website. Because opportunities to get a bunch of decent photographs and to work out how to describe it have been too hard to come by. It will damn well be on that website (at an appropriate hire rate) for 2016. A table and chairs might be another available bolt-on package, so if you have any old school directors chairs you don't use any more, I'm your girl. 

The financial update will happen another day, once I've paid myself what I owe myself, and paid myself back what I owe myself. Same goes for L. I think we've quite safely bought back the two new tents and all the new gubbins that we shelled out for earlier in the season though, at least by then end of the season we will have. I'll be pretty proud of that if it's true, to be honest. Let's wait and see. Maybe the excitement might be enough to make me get over myself and do the maths.