Where did the month go? Small businesses demand that you wear so many hats…and when your life and your business are one and the same most of the time, where exactly do you hang your hat? As I was thinking experiencing anxiety over the close of February and worrying listing all of the things we did this month, I stopped feeling so nervous about the impending Spring…

In February, we:

• made various arrangements with all of our summer help…the only position we’ve yet to fill is a teenage grunt…an affectionate term for a younger member of the team who doesn’t mind digging the occasional ditches, moving stones and shoring up bridges in the cold water
• worked with H2O marketing to complete our new logo and rack card…it’s going to the printers today
• cleaned out the file draws of the office and made room for this year’s papers…remember when all of the predictions were for a paperfree office? HUH!
• rebuilt my winter office to be more efficient and warmer…and painted the walls a soft, bright peach
• added 70 feet of shelf space on the stairwell to accommodate our growing collection of books on gardening, crafts, dutch oven cooking, Maine history and other interesting stuff
• sent out a call for instructors for Fiber College…286 contacts made…resulting in plenty of classes to choose from when we jury the applications in March
• answered approximately 1840 e-mail letters…I love the shift from phone calls to e-mail…don’t you?
• attended the Governor’s Conference on Tourism in Bangor…learned about some interesting new places to visit…I’ll have brochures when you come this summer
• attended SPA in Freeport (3 days of knitting, spinning, and talking fiber with 800+people…how cool is that!)…sure, LL Bean was there but in the scheme of fresh icelandic sheep’s wool and pretty yarn colors, there’s no comparison
• re-vamped the Fiber College website to reflect 2008
• began the re-design of the Searsport Shores website…to be unveiled next
• ordered supplies for this summer’s activities…we’ll have several Fairy House events…more on this later
• continued to research goats and sheep to see what would best fit into our little campground world…at the moment, curly haired, beautiful and friendly angora goats are at the top of the list
• carved out at least one hour each day to knit, spin or embroider…sometimes I indulged in two or three hours…but don’t tell.
• read three books, most notably The Lobster Coast by Colin Woodard
• walked the grounds with a USDA forester looking for signs of ash borers and found places for them to put traps in to monitor invaders before they become a problem…they are advocating that no wood be brought in from out-of-state to protect our Maine trees
• scoped out the site for our first tree house rental…it will have a view of the water and car parking…more later as this progresses
• gained 5 pounds…but soon we’ll be working outside, away from the pans of brownies and temptations of Chase’s Daily bread

I’m sure there’s more but I just wanted to assure everyone that running a campground isn’t boring