week three: still fishing

i'm writing this in starbucks; desperately sucking back americano (another nod in the diet direction) in an attempt to undeaden my head and make me alert and bright for a meeting with a "decision maker" this afternoon (the new and correct term for "potential", thank you blog readers!). unfortunately this is the same decision maker meeting as i prepared for last week as it transpired we'd had a diary mix up and i laughingly, somewhat gritted-teethly, said to the frowning secretary "men and their diaries, ha ha", only to come home and realise that this was probably my error....

sadly it is not a drunken binge which has left me in this state. at risk of this becoming a web-rant about motherhood rather than just the challenges of balancing it with business, i will share last night. it really begins last week. adam "reminded me" on thursday night that he'd be in London all of this week. so i found myself somewhat taken aback when on sunday at a children's party he really enthusistically started asking people around for a bonfire party at ours on saturday; glancing at me he did have the grace to add "oh yes, errm, i'm actually away all this week, and my parents arrive on friday, but i'll arrange it from london"..............

this is so profoundly wrong and impossible to conceive of given that these periodic london trips involve them all tying themselves to their laptops, flagellating themselves with ever-changing schedules of incomprehensibly large numbers, in an office where they are provided with food so they can work until 1am and have to get a pass to wee. i just feel, forgive me for being sceptical, that the finer details of the bonfire party may get forgotten. like the food. and the fireworks. and the party.

so, given that his parents will also require food i looked in the fridge and found a big bag of leeks. feeling frugally minded and at that point, quite energetic, i decided to look for a recipe that used leeks. it turns out that salmon and leek lasagne is nice so i opted for that, subsituting trout as it has also been in the freezer for a long time. little did i know that bedtime would be one of those truly awful bedtimes; with daughter #1 being given the ultimate punishment, never before followed through on, of NO STORY NUMBER TWO. once i'd said the words i couldn't take them back and this resulted in a tantrum of truly historic proportions, writhing, frothing, screaming, jumping. daughter #2 giggled a bit and did go to sleep however my efforts to placate #1 whilst maintaining the punishment were not hugely successful resulting in #2 re-awakening and requiring adelweiss to be sung on at least three different occasions (don't ask). for #1 i resorted to a huge hug while outlining why punishment was being stuck too: too harsh? so hard to know. at one point i was wondering who to call for advice on the next step but knew that my choice of callee would represent my desired outcome. mum would ask if it was really worth it at bedtime; fellow mums would say we need to follow through, gina would probably say it shouldn't have happened in the first place but if i follow her routine for the next three weeks i'd get back on track.

anyway, by 8pm there was silence. #2 was smelling a bit trouty due to her songs being interspersed with me rushing down to attempt to remove skin and a billion small bones from economy trout. (does non-economy trout have less bones?) by 9 there was a lasagne made, ready for saturday after the party, and a sainsburys on-line done involving a lot of chippolatas. i then made the odd decision to read until midnight, but #2 woke with a cough and a bit of a temperature at 2am and moved into my bed, sicked a bit of cattargh (had to type that into google for spelling) onto my side, slept horizontally across adam's side and woke shouting at 5.45am and turned all the lights on. joyous joyous joy.

so here i am. and my americano has gone cold and apparently it is not policy to renew it but having checked bank balance i'm refraining from buying another one. i need to fill that sales funnel.

and on that front there's been plenty of fishing but no catches yet: this week i blended another mix of gatekeepers and decision makers. my chamber of commerce membership came through so i've now mailed a group of charitable institutions, as one pull for not-for-profit organisations will be the non-permanent, flexible relationship that i can offer. i have also mailed a group of accounting firms to look for spill-over work. in the meantime i've chased my favoured client list. from this work i've arranged a meeting in two weeks; it's slow going. to bolster the networking efforts i'm going to two chamber networking dos; speed-networking being one of them! i never did speed-dating as by the time that took off i was with adam so this gives me a chance to give it a go. networking that is, not dating.. enthusiastically i attended a free networking event on friday, dressed in pink. as requested. it transpired it was more "buy our products" than a forum for business chat. the pink should have warned me really. but you network and you learn....