March Gets Off To A Good Start And Admiral Listings Are Half Complete

It is 4:00 pm on Friday with an hour to go in this first week of March. My stress has started to become a little less as I can see the business beginning to settle into a definite routine. Sales are usually heaviest on the weekend and the beginning of the week, with things quieting down on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. So far this week, we have had over $500 in sales, with most coming from repeat customers. I have noticed that Monday is usually spent catching up on the weekend orders, writing the blog posts for the beginning of the week and doing a little bit of listing, but not very much. Tuesday and Thursday are listing days where I can, if I am lucky get 100 items or so listed each day. Wednesday is usually spent processing orders and updating the blogs or doing some listings and the same goes for Friday. So while I do get some material listed each day, the lion's share of the work gets done on Tuesday and Thursday, when I work from 8 am to midnight. I am now, as I write,about half way through the Admiral material. I am pleased with my progress, although it has taken me much longer to list this material than I had hoped. My original goal was to have this material completed by the end of January and it has just not been possible to list it this quickly. I predict not that it will not be done before the end of March. However, I am OK with that, as my listings are quality listings and that is the important thing.

Steph is making great progress with organizing the modern Commemorative material, having organized everything up to 1976. Soon she will be ready to start with the scanning and listing of this material. She has an even sharper eye than I have and has brought several interesting varieties and anomalies to my attention. Most importantly though, she is loving her work and we are working incredibly well together. Our secret is that we work in separate parts of the house. She has taken over the upstairs office and made it her own, while I work at the dining room table next to Fabio, so that I can help him with any questions he has. He is doing well and gradually getting the hang of all the technical aspects that go into identifying and classifying stamps. He has completed the large lot of British Commonwealth he was working on and has now moved on to general world material.

Steph and I celebrated our third anniversary this week and decided to go out for a nice meal. We wound up trying this small restaurant called the Beach Tree on Kingston Rd. We had heard good things about it and had been meaning to go for 2 years, but somehow every single time we were about to go for dinner and were trying to decide where to go, we could never remember this place. So we just never went until this week. OMG!! I wish we had. It was without exaggeration, the most amazing food I have ever had. The only thing that has come even close was the Dover Sole that I had at Rules in Covent Garden in London. That meal, that I had on my first trip to London, that cost me 80 pounds five years ago was a perfect example of how amazing simple food can be when it is cooked to perfection. The subtlety and balance of flavours is impeccable and provides an experience so satisfying that you feel like you could just end the evening right afterward. I had thought all these years that it would be impossible for any chef to surpass Rules. Turns out I was wrong. Steph had their burger. The burger came with very few condiments and a small metal cup of the most delicious french fries you can imagine: crispy on the outside and light and fluffy as air on the inside. Despite having very few condiments, the burger was flavourful and juicy in all the right ways. It was just amazing. I had the smoked chicken thigh and buttermilk grits. I'd never had grits before, but the combinations of flavours and textures was to die for. We decided right there and then that we are going to make this a monthly thing: at the end of each month, we are going to reward ourselves with a meal there. I can't wait to try everything else on the menu!

So all in all, I'm optimistic to see how much progress we can make during the rest of the month.