The thick of it

This week has been agonizingly hectic and left me feeling a bit bogged down in spreadsheets. Normally I'm actually a big fan of spreadsheets, in fact I often use them to make lists of things I need to get done and when in the rest of my life. Unfortunately the ones I'm buried in up to my eyeballs require me to postulate estimates and projections that I'm unsure of, and often ask for line items that I cannot even define let alone calculate. I'm a very smart person, and I'm getting beat by these stupid .xls files!

In the meantime I'm also getting to dip into the really fun part of all this: contacting distributors. I know that sounds really dry, but drooling over page after page of every kind of cheese imaginable and making lists of first, second and third tier inventory is just heaven to me. It reminds of being a kid poring over the Sears Christmas catalog, dog-earing every page containing a desired item. There are cheeses I'd long forgotten from days back in Brooklyn, creamy delights that were only available a few months of the year, wrapped in nettle leaves or smoked with chicory and hazelnuts. There is one I can't wait to try that's given a rind of ground espresso and lavender.

And of course let's not forget the all important cash issue. I'm waiting for my incredibly generous mother-in-law, who is for all intensive purposes my mom, to send along her gift of seed money. It's money that was intended as a down payment on a home, but seeing as we are nowhere near any position to purchase real estate any time soon, I'm putting it to good use as cheese shop funding. I need to come up with 30% of my start up costs, and her gift + my savings + cashing out an old life insurance policy will just about get me there. I may need to sell a kidney on ebay to reach the $30,000 I need, but dammit I'm going to make it happen one way or another.