Exhausting! But we were meant for this...

Well, right now I have 3 websites I need to finish. My other job is wearing down on me pretty heavily. The only bills I PERSONALLY have is my $95 a month cell phone bill, and my lunch/dinner. I generally skip breakfast and lately and I've been trying to combine lunch with dinner to save money. I've also cut down drastically on eating out. Don't worry, all 133 pounds of me is still in healthy condition. I won't complain. All the money that I'm "saving" has been getting put towards the store. It will all pay off in the long run. Stay positive, right? Persevere.

I'm pretty thankful for my team, the online encouragement from all the forums I'm on and the local community support. It's awesome. Our friend Jason has been great with donating his time and labor with renovations. I don't know anything about holding anything other than a hammer and a screwdriver. So we're pretty fortunate to have someone like Jason who is a great handyman. My parents also happened to have a lot of scrap wood sitting storage that they were trying to unload anyway, so we took advantage of that. Needless to say, the store is actually starting to look like a store. An acquaintance on a forum that I frequent loaned me a tiny bit of money to help us get by. We were extremely fortunate for that. It would have been an overly tight month otherwise. Another acquaintance locally donated a computer and a broke Xbox 360. Thanks, Adam! Getting the console gaming half of the store is definitely the biggest uphill thing we have going for us.

The biggest thing that stresses me out right now is our electric bill. We don't have bank loans, we don't have grants, we have me and my soon-to-be part time job at Verizon and we currently are not making ANY revenue for the business store-wise because we're not open til Feb 6! So hm.

One other thing is the huge response of people wanting jobs! Two people work with me. Gil Wilson and Tyler Akers. I retain title of owner, so I take financial responsibility for the most part. Gil manages comics and the studio downstairs. Tyler manages the upstairs with me and finances (and by that I mean, he tells me how we should budget our funds). I don't always know how to reply to people wanting a job. I'd like to hire people, but I know that won't be plausible for awhile and that's going to mean we're going to be working long, long, long hours. The idea of volunteers sounds cool. But still, that's a ways off. How can I expect to train people for a position here if I'm still training myself? Still adapting? Figuring out the rhythm of how things will run is at least a quarter of the battle.