The End of Summer

Summer has just begun but sadly, in my mind, it's already over. Saturday was the 3rd Annual Mt Tabor Croquet Invitational, a tournament Jeff and I have hosted at our house for the last...3 years. We set the date in early March and the anticipation had been steadily mounting for months so that when the day finally arrived, it felt perfectly anticlimactic and a little disappointing, although by anyone's standards it was a success. One big chunk of summer over. We will cater a wedding in another three weeks, so until then there's a perpetual to-do list scrolling through my head. Another two weeks after the wedding, Jeff and I leave for a trip back to the East Coast, resulting in another to-do ticker. We haven't even decided whether to close and 'remodel' (unlikely, as we have no plans drawn at this point) or entrust the kids to run the show. Oh and then there's the matter of Brian, our latest hire, giving his not-quite-two-weeks notice last week, which means the hiring and training of at least one new person, possibly two. (Brian, by the way, got job offer in NYC which for some insane reason he feels compelled to take. Whatever!) Hiring and training is one of the hardest things about business management. No matter how many times you do it, you always feel like you could be doing a better job--I fantasize about a multimedia "Half & Half Training Package" I would create if I had the time, complete with charts of sandwich cross-sections, a guide to how much ice goes in different iced drink orders, a flawless pricing guide. Meanwhile, the longer you do something, the worse you are at demonstrating it, so training somehow becomes harder the more I do it.

So, by the time we have returned from The East (where we have tentative plans to hook up with Brian in New York. I can't wait to watch him cry and beg us to take him back to Portland), it will be mid-august, which means I need to start booking art shows for 2007 and getting ready for the holidays. So in my mind, Christmas is like, next week. Which is why it makes sense that we started getting excited about the Croquet Tournament in early March, it was practically the height of summer.