"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of it, not the absence of it." - Mark Twain

apologies

I think I may institute a policy of sending out free bags of coffee to everyone subscribed to this blog when I don't follow through with writing when I say I will. Maybe then I'll be more prompt with writing...maybe. My apologies for not writing when I said I would. While I could simply go in and erase the part in the last entry where I said I would write the following week, I won't. Doing that wouldn't be staying true with chronicling the good, the bad, and the embarrassing. Let's just pretend I said I would write a month after the last entry rather than a week.

struggles

The last month was more difficult than we expected it to be. After deciding not to open the shop when/where we were planning and wrapping up our first huge wholesale order things seemed to aimlessly float around in front of me. I do my best when there are challenges to overcome, clear goals to achieve, and lots of work to be done. The challenge of the last month was learning to be ok with not opening a shop in the foreseeable future, which is something I was not expecting to deal with. It was more of an intangible, personal thing to overcome rather than a concrete problem that can be solved by cleverness or hard work. Give me a tangible, impossible challenge to solve any day rather than having to deal with my own faults and weaknesses. But as Mark Twain points out, true courage is not founded in ignoring or suppressing things. It's found in looking challenges/fears/shortcomings in the face and taking steps forward to overcome and own them rather than letting them own you. "Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience." Romans 8:24-25

exciting news (about a store)

Anyway, enough personal rambling. On to the exciting stuff. I'll write more details as things begin to solidify, but it seems that after deciding not to open a shop the way we were expecting (with some difficult lag time in between) we're back on track to open one in a different way! Jon and I have had series of meetings with a group that wants to open a coffee shop and bakery combo. The great thing for us is that they want to fund and own the shop but have a professional baker running the bakery and coffee pros (enter Bridge City) running the coffee portion of it. It's not the exact location we were expecting with our own shop, but it's still a great one! This would be different than we originally anticipated doing on our own but there are some huge positives along with those differences. As before I'm writing as things happen, which means I will either reveal more about this as it happens or come back with another cue the Charlie Brown mopey theme music post about how things didn't work out. Either way, come back for more reading and try to spread the word about what we're doing, we'd really appreciate it!