I’m trying my very best to become a more grownuppish company. After doing a lot of research/ watching Shark Tank on Hulu while I rode my exercise bike, I decided that it was time to:
* Research licensing. Doesn’t that sound impressively corporate?
* Push to finish the new products that have been in development for more than a year now. Just solve the silly problems already and be done!
* Maybe set up a more sophisticated accounting system than the one I do in Excel. Not saying that YOU aren’t sophisticated if you use Excel for tracking expenses and income; for a lot of people, Excel-based book keeping is probably perfect. But my Excel skills equip me to use it as nothing more than graph paper. I know how to set a print area because one day I finally called my friend Nina almost in tears saying for dear lovely Christ, why won’t it print??, and I know how to make different workbooks because she happened to mention it in that conversation and that’s about it. So after a few years of being in business, I reached the limits of graph paper and began researching accounting software for small businesses. Nobody can drag out comparison shopping like this lady right here, but after carefully weighing all of the options for months and months I panicked one night and bought QuickBooks.

Holy shit.

It’s just software, right? I know how to read and how to balance a checkbook. I would simply walk through the setup steps and learn as I went. I proudly told our accountant, “So we have Quickbooks now, so you know, i guess we’re pretty impressive with how mature we are, even though it is so intimidating that we havent installed it but STILL.” He was excited for us and said not to worry, it is very easy to use but now that I think about with hindsight and all, our accountant thinks a lot of things are exciting and easy and wonderful that we think are boring and difficult and horrible and that’s the whole entire reason why we pay him to do those things for us. So when he said “Quickbooks will be easy!” I should have immediately returned it and used the money to pay an out of work college student to follow me around recording expenses and income. But no, no I think I am so clever. Quickbooks! I can do this!

I installed it and launched the super easy quick setup wizard. Perfect! You already know what this next stuff is going to say, right? It kicked my bottom. I had to stop every few minutes to look up the words they were saying to me. A lot of times I just made my best guess. I was going along alright until I got to the question: START DATE.

Start date? Today, right now? No, not right now! There are outstanding balances and whatnot. A month ago, a year ago? What do they MEEEEeeeeean asking for a start date? And why is there a warning saying that this is very hard to change later if you do not choose well. The wise Google chorus agreed that a start day of today would be easiest, but for some reason that felt weird so I split the difference by closing the software and not looking at the set up wizard for two months.

When I finally came back to it, oh right. Start date. Sheepishly clicked “today” and went on. Back to looking up every new term, and many old terms that don’t mean the same thing in accounting as they mean everywhere else. Words like ACCOUNTS. and BALANCE. And OH MY GOD why am I making you read all about this when my own brain defends itself against learning Quickbooks by going to sleep? Every time I launched the little cute Quickbooks icon, it was a race against time because no matter what time of day or night, no matter what kind of lighting or sound or chaos there was in the room, in ten minutes I would be asleep. Big Pharma would lose a lot of Ambien sales if people knew how well this worked.

But in those tiny little windows of awake setting-up time, I think I might’ve gotten it mostly pretty well set up. There are still things that make me run to the Facebook thingy and beg strangers and loved ones for help… For the love of poop, tell me how to make it print! How do I add shipping to an invoice? When I make an invoice or a packing slip from a customer job, why do I have to re-enter all of the items and quantities even though doing so leaves room for errors and makes me want to give up and go buy an above-ground pool full of giant gymnastics foam blocks and list it as a business expense?

But we all have to start somewhere, right? I got the For Dummies book, and I’m using Google as my Quickbook for Dummies for No-seriously, DUMMIES guide, and in a couple of months I hope to sit down with our accountant and show him our beautiful books and he will say well done! This all looks perfect! Clearly it was put together by someone who is not an idiot! Didnt i say it was easy?? And I will laugh because ohhhh you! And then I will run at him with a sharp pen like I’m going to kill him with it!

But then I won’t kill him because we love him and we are so deeply grateful for whatever is wrong with some people’s brains that makes them love accounting. For that I am thankful, amen.

1. I propose that we change the name of this tool:

to Spatula.

And this tool:

we change to Batter Scraper.

And this tool:

and this one

shall be called Mr.Scoopy.

And these:

will be called Science Slurpee Straws

And these:

Will be called What Am I even Cooking Here? Fish? Is it fish? Let’s call this a Fish Turner.

2. I further propose that we change the name of Daylight Savings Time to something that will help people remember which way it goes. Like Moresleep’s Eve or something in the fall, and it could be a holiday which features drinking wine and being hungover. Then in the spring we could have something like Jumping Day. These will be fun holidays with little cakes and things, and they will be connected to the season rather than to each other.

3. For people with combo-type IBS, let’s make a pill that is half laxative and half immodium. I’m hoping that Stop-n-Go will license their logo to us. My backup name is Stopalax. Or Go-dium.

Similarly, I want a pill that’s half Ambien and half Provigil. It will make you stay awake for 24 hours, and that whole time you will be talking dreamstate nonsense. I’m trying to decide whether these should be packaged like the dual-flavor packs of Nerds, or if it should be half and half, OR smashed all together like shampoo+conditioner.

4. All parents who are frustrated by the way that high-stakes testing has hijacked education? Shall encourage their children to mark the letter C for every single answer to every question. This act of civil disobedience aims to shift the conversation back to what matters. How do we want to educate our kids? What’s the goal here? And how is handcuffing our best teachers to a test helping us reach that goal?

5. Further to this proposal, I humbly suggest that Jeggings be banned from this earth forever, not because I care about anyone else’s style choices but because they are that uncomfortable.

Miscellaneous mountain has returned, and it is very, very angry at me for destroying its predecessor.

Last week I started surrendering. It’s too much! It’s too far against my very nature. It would be like dressing up as a person with blue eyes. How? How would I even?

So for a bunch of days I switched over to planning, leaning heavily on this classic home organization self-help video. I wrote it all out several times just to be sure my plan would work. My plan to sit on my couch and do nothing while still feeling productive I mean.

The toys that are in the front closet don’t need to be there! They need to be in the kids’ room, and now they have enough space in there thanks to the dual loft bed set up.

That means we can put things in the front closet that we rarely use but do need access to — like the air mattress for guests, luggage, wrapping paper, things like that. I’m thinking the vacuum cleaner might live there, too.

THAT stuff had all been piled on the floor of our bedroom closet! Why? I don’t know! But now the bedroom closet could hold wire shelfy things. And THAT could hold clothes!

Finally I started moving things to their new, non-crazyperson homes. This! This was going to fix everything!

Well. I don’t know how, but the big closet shuffle — which really on paper was very simple and efficient — created even more new piles of junk to sort through. The kids have too many toys, by several times over, I think. Or maybe it’s that they share a room? So it looks like too many? Maybe there are lots of mirrors somewhere? I don’t know.

We also have too much paper in our life.

And my office is back to being a labyrinth of boxes and inventory, though I tell myself well! This is all new stuff. Think how bad it would be if you hadn’t cleaned it out a few weeks ago!

The living room is a wreck right this minute. DIning room is piled high with our new mountain of flash cards, fresh from the printer and ready to collate.

The only nice place to be right now is the kitchen. Ahhh, all of that work I did to make the kitchen has paid for itself in the number of meals I’ve cooked at home. I like being in there now, I find it relaxing and rewarding to cook in a place where I can find the knife and the scraper thing and the whatever it’s called that I want to call a spatula but isn’t a spatula. We’ve had some freakishly delicious and fancy meals over the last couple of weeks because the rest of the house is piled with hostile little corners of junk, and the kitchen opens her arms and says come in here! Put the iPad over there on the counter and watch TED talks and Yes to the Dress (the opposite of TED talks) and wash dishes and chop celery and make red potatoes in browned butter sauce with brocolini. Turn on the cheerful little lamp, look up what pesto is exactly and find out how to cook the fancy steak you bought on accident because someone put it in the wrong place and you didn’t notice the price until you were home.

So. This weekend I want to attack Misc Mountain #2, Revenge of my Bullshit. And figure out a workable system for keeping papers from bursting out of control every single day. And get the boys’ stuff under control if it kills me them. And Nicolaus has enthusiastically volunteered to help me organize all of our tools and hardware and batteries and everything he finds interesting in the garage.

When all of this is done, I will gather my courage and clean out everything that’s hiding in the coffee table under-cabinet things. And then who knows? Maybe I’ll find out what’s under the couch.