Blogiversary III: A Day In The Life

To wrap up our little “Blogiversary III” celebration this week, I thought it would be fun to do a little Day-In-The-Life post where you could follow me around for a “typical” day.  Air quotes typical because it wasn’t necessarily a typical day for me (Wednesday), which was a work day and a slow one since I was still recovering from the madness that was the logger’s show (one of the biggest, industrial selling shows my company attends).  Some of my favorite posts from my favorite bloggers have been posts that give me a glimpse into their everyday lives.  So I hope you enjoy this post.  But if not, we’ve got some major DIY projects coming at you later this week.

5:45 am – Alarm clock starts blaring.  I subconsciously smack it and fall right back to sleep.

6:24 am – Realized I’m running REALLY late for work (I usually start my work day at 7:00 am).  There goes any chance of having a good hair day.  Oh, who am I kidding…a mediocre hair day at best.  Off to “power shower” and bust out of the house in record time.  (Note to self…maybe it’s time to upgrade the hot pink, rubberized alarm clock for something a bit more adult-like).

6:52 am – Miraculously finished getting ready for work and realize I’m out of my morning tea.  The perfect excuse to run through the drive through at Tim Horton’s (like I really need an excuse).

6:58 am – Somehow make it to work on time on a rainy Wednesday.  I was fully prepared to blame the rain for my tardiness.  I don’t think a work day goes by that I don’t appreciate my under five minute commute to work.  Essentially, I live just across the bridge from the office.

7:00 am – I settle into my office, boot up my computer, and review my to-do list/priority list for the day.  Nerd alert.

7:25 am – After reading and responding to a ridiculous amount of emails, I’m starting to get hungry.  I dive into my fave breakfast of blueberries with greek yogurt and suck down my “morning margarita”.  For those of you unfamiliar with the “morning margarita”, let me explain.  It’s the name that my bestie, Heather, and I gave to the Tim Horton’s iced cappuccino (made with milk not cream to save those crazy calories).  It’s an instant pick me up and oh so delicious (and not too bad for you without the cream).

7:36 am – I start pouring through our Google Analytics web statistics to see if I can gain any insights from yesterday’s web traffic.  Nothing new and unusual.  Tap & die fluid continues to sell strong thanks to Google search, general traffic for the month is stronger than normal, Memphis Alycore gloves are still trending, and our Southern Maine web traffic is more rapidly growing than our overall traffic.  I love stats!

8:06 am – My major task for the day is sending out the weekly NH Bragg email blast to our general mailing list.  This week’s focus…Campbell custom chain slings assembled at NHB.  I put the final touches on it, edit it extensively, and fire it off.  I may have bias-ly picked the topic…Campbell Chain…my last name is Campbell…

8:25 am – Initial stats and responses to the email blast are already rolling in.  I respond to a few customer questions, update our databases for undeliverables, and go through/delete the HUNDREDS of “out of office replies”.  Apparently this week was a big vacation week with Memorial Day coming.

11:00 am – How am I still updating our email blast/customer contact databases?!  Oh yeah…it’s because we just switched over to Constant Contact from a custom developed email blast program which apparently didn’t work very well.  In the last few weeks I have removed over 2,500 email addresses from our distribution list AND updated our customer databases (with notes) on our enterprise applications.  Hopefully the next round of emails goes smoother and we have finally cleaned up our database.

12:00 pm – Home for lunch to play with this dude:

Have I mentioned that I love my five minute commute to/from work?!  I spend just about every lunch break home with the dog.  If it’s nice we play outside and if it’s rainy and gross (or freezing) we play inside.  Cookie tossing is our favorite game (ie. I throw a cookie, Goose runs after it, Goose eats said cookie).  Goose hasn’t met a cookie yet that he doesn’t like (and immediately consume).

12:15 pm – After a quick round of outdoor cookie tossing, it starts to rain…again…it’s been raining for a week…ugh (and it’s still raining three days later).  We go inside and I nuke up some leftover last-night’s-dinner of orecchiette with sausage in a swiss chard cream sauce.  It’s one of those Better Homes and Gardens recipes that I ripped out of the magazine.  They have the best recipes!

1:00 pm – It’s back to work for the afternoon.  I’m really not feeling like doing computer work today, which as a marketing director is what I do about 98% of the time.  Since my office was an absolute disaster zone after the logger’s show, I start cleaning it up.  This is after my office space became “acceptable” (hanging head in shame).

It was worse…much much worse before.  I couldn’t even bring myself to post the before picture.  Just imagine boxes upon boxes of stuff…everywhere!

2:35 pm – After an hour-ish of cleaning my office I start to get bored.  I start rotating office cleaning with adding Indusco chain and fittings to our website, building product headings, descriptions and adding photos.  Also a boring but necessary task.  I fight the urge to crawl under my desk and take a nap…George Kastanza style.

4:00 pm – My work day is almost, ALMOST done, but one more task looms.  I have to clean the bathroom at work.  That’s my amused face.

At least I get to wear jeans to work on bathroom cleaning days (and my wedding sandals!!!!).  Why do I have to clean the bathroom?!  You see…back in 2009-ish, right around the time the market tanked, one of the cost cutting measures my company made was to fire our nighttime cleaning crew with the employees picking up the slack.  Hence, the ladies at work (which there are only a few of us in the male dominated business) take turns cleaning the women’s bathroom.

4:30 pm – Hootie hoo it’s quitting time!  Back over the bridge to home I go!

4:35 pm – Colby is already home from a day on the road as a mill work salesman.  We crash on the couch to discuss our days which includes:  (1) why can’t we win the lottery so we could just spend all our time traveling and not working, (2) oh yeah…first we need to play the lottery, and (3) breaking news on the bass boat front.  We’re pseudo, casually looking to purchase a bass boat. Emphasis on pseudo.

5:00 pm – I toss in a load of laundry (the laundry fairy has been slacking lately), clean up the kitchen and make a batch of laundry soap. The Kitchen Aid is a life knuckle saver when it comes to bar soap shredding.

6:00 pm – I crash on the couch once again, pull up the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy on the tv (via Hulu) and try to download Gimp onto my netbook to test it out.

6:15 pm – Contract a nasty computer virus.  Awesome.  It came bundled with the Gimp freeware.  Colby to the rescue.

7:00 pm – Make a quick salad for dinner.

8:00 pm – While Colby is still trying to fix my netbook, I settle down on my Mac and start photo editing and resizing photos for the remainder of this week’s blog posts.  My poor, ten year old Mac is super struggling trying to run Photoshop this evening.  Not a good day to be my computer.

9:00 pm – Pound out a blog post, respond to blog comments and emails, and do my blogger due diligence for the night.  Also check in on the Etsy shop and respond to a few potential customers…finger’s crossed we close the sale!

10:30 pm – I call it night and crash into bed.  But first, Colby let’s Goose out to do his “business-es”.  Goose gets a cookie for coming inside and “going to bed”, we tuck him in for the night in “his room” (the craft room…and I wish I was kidding), and head across the hall to tuck ourselves into bed.

We lead exciting lives, really exciting lives.  But I wouldn’t trade it for anything!  I love the blogging and Etsy shop work, the day job pays the bills, Goose is always entertaining, and I super love having Colby in my life!  Cue up the “awwwww”!  Sure there are frustrating days (hello…computer virus) but if that’s the biggest of my problems…I’ll take it!

Pssst…How about you guys?  What is your typical day in a nutshell?  Or all your days crazy different and exciting?  Is it just me, or the older you get the more routine your life seems to become?!  Right down the wake up time/snooze time?!