Busy Season

My busy season for work has officially set in. No more late starts, long lunch/shopping breaks, and no more calling it a day around 3:00 or so. November through March is the time here at work when I can hardly catch my breath, let alone enjoy the holiday season. For the past couple of years I have almost dreaded the holidays because I know that I have no "down" time, so to speak. I will still take a couple days off during Thanksgiving and Christmas, but that will just mean double time to make up for it. Here is a sampling of what I have to get done and accomplished during the next few weeks and months.

Starting today - I have membership renewals to get processed and mailed out to each individual member of the association (that's a total of almost 700), let's just hope that number stays the same this year or increases. I have a magazine deadline on Monday, which means I have to get all the articles written, photos formatted and organize my district events in calendar order. This magazine covers January-April, so that's a lot of writing that needs to be accomplished and a lot of events that need to be planned. My Leadership and Enhancement and Development Program is in December, so shirts need to be ordered, meeting space finalized and meals set up for three days. During that time I also have my last Board of Directors' meeting of the year. This meeting isn't usually that time consuming, but this year there is a lot of business to be discussed. I have 4 agenda items that I need to put together for a vote, so I am not anticipating this meeting to be a short one - and one of the items that will be voted on is the budget for 2010 and I still haven't got that balanced, not sure that I will either. And my most major, time consuming event is in January each year, this is my annual conference. Right now I am working on all my speaker requests, unfortunately I am going to have to decline most of their financial requests, whatever happened to doing something out of the goodness of your heart? I have 40 speakers and over half of them want to be compensated for speaking to our group for one hour. Most want logding, mileage, and meals taken care of - this equals out to almost $700 per speaker! My tradeshow is coming together, but that is usually the easy part, the hard part is getting my attendees to show up so my exhibitors aren't unhappy about all the money they spent. Events that need to be planned for conference are, a golf tournament, a draw-down (sell 400 tickets for this), 2 other social events, an awards banquet, business meeting, opening general session, and I need to secure lots of sponsors for this event. Getting sponsors is definately my weark spot. I hate calling people and asking them for money, and believe me they hate hearing from me as well! All these things are just a dip in the barrell of what I am dealing with on a day to day basis. I personally think this is too much stress for one girl to handle, but I am very thankful for the job I have.

Speaking of stress, just yesterday I had to go to the Doctor, again, for an earache. He told me that the earache is caused from my jaw - I grind my teeth - and this is the result of too much stress. I asked what on earth I could do about this and he smiled and said stop stressing out :) - thanks Doc!

The year will be ending soon and I know another Spring is on the horizon and for the most part Spring and Summer are nice here at the office. So I can look forward to that. After my March trip to DC, it should be smooth sailing, at least for a couple of months.

When Brian and I first started dating, I would have nights when I would work until 7:00 or 8:00 and never take a lunch break, those days are over too, since I have other obligations at home, this sometimes adds to the stress, but I wouldn't change that for a moment. I will do whatever it takes to be out of here by 5:00 every day. I look forward to my time at home now, spending time with Brian, Hayden and Maggie means more to me than anything else. I always have to tell myself that my job is what I do, not who I am! My family defines me, not my job!