It's Monday morning and I have dragged myself out of bed. It is Carla's 6:00AM morning and my 8:00AM morning. We did not have dinner service last night so I went to bed early and I slept in a little, meaning I didn't get out of bed until 6:00! I got 8 hours and 43 minutes of sleep last night, according to my Fitbit. Today feels like it will be as good a day as any to get back on track. I started blogging in the middle of a weekend, which are always the worst for sleep and food because the days are so long due to dinner service. I have four reasonable days ahead of me, with few guests and no dinner service because Carla is on dinner service this Thursday. I am going to focus on getting 8 hours of sleep for the next 4 nights. 5 nights in a row of 8 hours of sleep should make a big difference. I will focus on getting outside for a walk or hike every day. I will focus on making good food choices. I hope to feel much better by the end of the week.
I desperately need a hair cut. I have gotten one hair cut since I've been here and it's starting to get shaggy. I started left a message for the hair salon last week but they never called back. It is a little different up here, where it is pretty rural. Everything happens at a slower pace. I left another message yesterday. They open at 10 today. Maybe I'll just show up. It's right down the street.
The bottom line about all of this is that I will not sacrifice my health for any job. I am really glad Carla and I are doing this gig. I have learned a tremendous amount. I am 100% confident that I would be an excellent innkeeper, should I decide to own an inn some day. I am incredibly grateful to Carla for the work she has done the last couple of years with Lark Hotels and Graylag, because that experience taught her so much and because without it, we wouldn't be here today. Carla has taught me a lot that I needed to know. It is a humbling experience when you do a job and your kid inspects your work and proceeds to tell you what you missed. That has happened more than once, by the way. Our plans for what we want in the future are slowly morphing into something different than what we had originally talked about. There is no doubt in either of our minds about dinner service, we don't want to do it. I admire those innkeepers that successfully run a dinner business. Our dinners are great and they get high marks and we could generate more dinner business in the long run if we advertised more, but man it's exhausting. It's too much to get up at 5:30 to start work at 6 to have breakfast service start at 8 and to also start prepping for dinner at 3:00 so dinner service can start at 5:30 and go to 8. The entire day is spent in the kitchen, you get no sleep, and so much other things don't get done. The answer, of course, sounds like it is to hire more staff. This would work, of course, and the successful dinner inns have head chefs that do most of the cooking and planning for dinner. But, in my opinion, the innkeeper is still present for both breakfast and dinner. Also, you have to do a pretty steady dinner business in order to afford a chef and any other help he needs. We have a chef in the evenings, and we have a bartender/server. But one of us still helps out. Given the extra work and stress of having dinner service, neither Carla nor I think it is something we need in order to achieve our goals.
Our vision is changing in other ways, too. Carla's interests lie much more in the realm of focusing on the parts of industry that she excels at and she is not too keen on the idea of owning an inn or being the general manager of an inn. I, on the other hand, very much want my own place. So it seems likely that we may focus on buying a smaller place that Jack and I will own, that I will primarily run with help from Jack and back up support and some help from Carla, and Carla will focus on areas that really interest her. This probably makes more sense in many ways, than our original plan. It is all going to hinge on finding the right property. I find myself poking around the internet at night, seeing if I can find something that appeals to me. So far, I haven't found it, but it is out there somewhere. I think we need to start putting out feelers one of these days. Before too long, we may want to hire an representative to help us with the search.
For now, I need to focus on my health. If I am not satisfied that I can run and inn and be healthy at the same time, I will give up on this idea and do something else. I have 7 months to get back in shape. I can do this. I want to own my own business and I want to be healthy. Is that too much to ask? I don't think so.
Have a good day. Enjoy spring!!
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