Busy time of the year....

Tony likes to say that this time of year for us (meaning September thru Thanksgiving) is our "Christmas" here at the creamery. Sales are usually up, our customers are thinking about cooking food, and that just makes us smile. Well on top of the normal hustle and bustle we also have a bunch of HUGE projects going on in the creamery and around the farm as well, and everything is happening at ONCE!

Last week when the guys went down to Virginia Beach to buy and bring home all the equipment, well now it is getting repaired/updated and will be installed in the very near future...and since we are not building a new plant, the old will have to be removed to put the "new" in so Tony is working on an action plan that will allow for the new install and still manage to bottle and produce so that we can continue to make deliveries in the midst of all of this! We actually will be selling some of our old equipment and we had some guys stop in today that are interested in starting up a plant in southern Virginia. So we may be able to get good money for our used equipment!!

Today is the cut-off for our Thanksgiving turkey orders, last year we sold over 350 turkeys, and we are almost there as of noon today when I left to come home and feed the kids their lunch. These turkeys will either be picked up at our on-farm store, be delivered on the delivery trucks, or sold at the Baltimore Farmers Market. So once the order gets placed tomorrow it will then be time to figure out if all the turkeys will fit alongside the milk on the normal delivery trucks or if we will have to do extra runs to get all the turkeys delivered by Thanksgiving.

We have been in negotiations with this other home delivery business for about a year now. This guy delivers to about 200 customers in areas we are already in and he wants out and wants us to buy his truck and customer base. I think Tony and him have FINALLY agreed on a price so we will be adding those customers to our ever growing base of 1667. I think Tony said our goal for this year was to get to a customer base of 2000, and we will be pretty close if this business deal goes thru and we keep gaining other customers by word-of-mouth!

My brother and Kate are getting ready to place their house on the market so that they can move here to the farm, Dad was able to get ahold of 2 mobile homes and the guys have been busy this week getting them ready to move from the Ijamsville area up here to 2 lots on the farm. It will certainly be nice for them to be closer and the cousins will certainly get to play together more often, and also Sophia and Sam could ride the bus together to school!

Our store clerk had FINALLY gotten approval from her doctor that she could come back to work and her first day back was to be today, she decided at the last minute that she wasn't up to it yet, so now Mom is stuck back in the store. You don't realize how few customers actually come into our farm store on any given day until you are stuck working there the entire day...it can get to be quite boring,we have discussed cutting back the hours, but if our regular store clerk does ever come back, it works out nice, because she can do much more than just run the register, she would package and label products, rotate inventory, clean and lots of other tasks and we figured as long as she was there doing all that anyway, the store could be open and she could assist customers, but when it is one of us in the store we have other jobs that need to be done and being stuck in the store for hours on end for one or two customers can be frustrating. We are thinking about possibly hiring someone else, but then it may be a waste of time cause she will be ready to come back...so we don't know what to do...

Thursday's are the day that my mom goes to the grocery store for herself so I always send my list along with her so that she does my shopping for me, and it is amazing how much money I save on weekly groceries now because she only buys what is on my list and I don't impulse shop. The last few months I have had our grocery bills be around $100 per month (because the only items I buy are rice, pasta, canned items, and chicken nuggets) we get the rest from the farm or farmers markets and I LOVE Schwan's Home Service for complete quickie meals on days that I am not able to get home in time to cook a decent meal!