Wow.  Just sat down to get back to work and I notice there have been no posts since 10/09.  That’d make me wonder if we’re even still in business. Here’s what’s been going on.  Get ready, it’s not a nice story.

I was scheduled for surgery in November ’09, so I was busy getting my proverbial ducks in a row.

Surgery was canceled at the very last second because, I guess, certain herbs do not play nice with anesthesia.  So surgery was rescheduled to December ’09.  More time to order the ducks, didn’t blog for another month.

Surgery went well but recovery revealed just what a wimp I am, and I didn’t get any work done after surgery, either.

6 weeks into recovery,  January 14th, (here’s the ugly part) my aunts knocked on my door and told me my mother and 2 sisters had been shot, 2 were dead,  one was in the hospital, and they didn’t know which sister was which, but my mom, for sure, was “gone.”   Over the next 5 hours we found out that one of my sisters had actually left the scene a few minutes earlier and was unharmed,  and my little sister (18) was in stable condition after 5 gunshot wounds.

That was 7 months ago.  You would think things could not get worse, but they have, steadily, since that day.   Needless to say, I haven’t worked on my business at all.  I’ve shipped orders, but that’s it.   And today, as I thought hard about getting back to work on a regular schedule, I realized that there’s more to my staying away than I thought.  For instance, my mother taught me this business, and I’ve never worked on it without her around.  Coming back to work is going to be another very raw passageway through the grieving process, which I am not looking forward to at all.   I’m told of this process,  “you have to go through it, there is no way around.”  So here we go.