A day of training a new person, inputting inventory, too many people behind the desk at one time, and I am exhausted tonight.

In the morning shift of my day at Commonwheel, I had a very fruitful meeting with two advertising people from the CS Independent. They are going to go beyond the normal advertising relationship for us and help me in other ways. One of them may have a solution for how we can afford to “keep the Music playing” at the 2014 Arts Festival. That is a pretty exciting lead he has for me.

And they have a sister paper that I want to get some conversations with about our Co-op Gallery, and the Arts Festival both being in their 40th year. We need to celebrate and have the media get excited for us also.

And on Monday, I have a meeting with someone for the advertising side of the other major sponsor and newspaper in our area. Hope I can get her as excited as the CS Independent folks were when they left the Gallery.

I also helped a new person learn the ropes of being a gallery sales desk worker during the afternoon shift.

Since the Commonwheel offices that were in our basement were destroyed by the flooding last summer, the inventory is done by another member at a computer in the sales area.

And so is the shipping information. We have a member learning the ropes for doing the shipping and things were not going smoothly for her, and she could not handle working in the “cold storage” room where all of the items needed for packing were kept. So she was working in the Gallery area, and twice needed on the accounting computer.

Plus we had a decent sales day for the Pots By The Pound sale going on in the guest artist gallery area.

So it got very crowded behind the sales desk today, with me training a new member, and two other members needing access to the second computer, and customers lining up items that needed weighing all in a very small area.

I worked on my inventory, which also added to the crowding of the sales area, but there wasn’t anywhere else to go, as I didn’t want to leave the new member alone if  was to go into the “cold storage” room and work there. Plus I really didn’t want to be that cold today.

I don’t think I sat down all day long and my feet are very sore and tired now.

At the end of the day, I still had to do the Festival T-shirt inventory, and that was more challenging than I had expected.

We close the shop at 6:00 pm in the winter. The new person had some difficulties checking out properly, so I worked with her until after 6:30pm. Then I didn’t get the T-shirt inventory finished until 8:00 pm.

Some of the T-shirts that are very different from other ones have the same code. Not good! And I didn’t have the energy to fix them, so I put all of the mis-tagged shirts in one tub with a note that they need new tags. I made up the proper inventory numbers, so I could give a completed inventory to our accountant, but will have someone else make the tags another day.

Came home and luckily had some great leftover food that was easy to heat up for dinner, and decided I needed a drink.

And with this the last thing I absolutely have to do tonight, I am going to head to bed early so I can rest my feet properly and get a head start on the day tomorrow.