Not now!

This week is the calm before the storm. If by "calm" you mean hiring two part-time employees, setting up new cash registers, making a presentation to the hospital's administrators, training a temp to mind the "old" store while the staff of the "new" store is in training, making sure all the training materials have arrived, reserving A/V equipment for training, staying in contact with our corporate district manager, and coordinating with outside vendors to reprogram the cash register POS system.

The storm? Two weeks of training, setting up the new store, followed by the first week in the new store. Sounds easier, actually, than the so-called calm. But it won't be.

When I attended training in January, it was much more exhausting than I expected. At the end of every day, I was tired. Tired from dealing with a roomful of people I'd never met before. Tired from the barrage of new information. Tired from making and tasting drinks all day.

This training will be even more tiring, since I'm the manager and it's my store. I've been working with two of my five employees for the past few weeks, but that leaves three who are essentially strangers. And college-age. (I think that's a good thing, but I may live to regret hiring four people under 21. I'll let you know.) And the "old" store will still remain open during the training, and I'm still ultimately responsible for it.

Pesky human cloning. They need to hurry up with that one.

Oh, and did I mention that I left work early with a killer headache, complete with some delightful nausea? I'm hoping that it's stress and not the flu. Because I really don't have the time to be sick.

But my new store looks fantastic and I can't wait until May 27.