going out of business blog - day two

tom from port folio was in on wednesday to talk about going out of business and it was sunny and bright and he made the comment that the spring weather made him feel hopeful until he came into the store and the gloom set in with the knowledge that we were closing.

today is totally the opposite. it's gloomy outside and cold and i really just had a customer come in and try to return a book she bought full price so that she could get that money back and spend it on discount books. no, i'm not kidding. how do you stay hopeful when people are really this way? we had to put up a no returns accepted sign because someone returned a book that she'd just bought several hours before because she got home and it wasn't what she was expecting.

but, somehow on this gloomy day i am hopeful. there are enough people that really care about the store in the world that they give me hope that maybe someday my dreams of running a bookstore that pays its own bills will come around again. i got an email from two of my favorite customers this morning. this couple has been driving to see me from virginia beach since we opened. i have watched their children grow up over the past five years, thomas was in a carrier, just a tiny baby and elizabeth wasn't much bigger when they started driving to portsmouth. now..they're both reading themselves. i have an awesome picture of thomas snoozing in the kids room when we used to have a hammock there. they know me, and i know them, and we know each other well enough that we'll not ever forget each other. that gives me hope.

chris called me this morning when i was brushing my teeth and told me that the computers weren't working. i asked if she had turned them off and then on again (i'm so technologically minded!) and she had, so i said i'd be right there. i tried to give her a hard time and say i'd been up until three waiting tables and that she should have let me sleep when i got here and found out that she had forgotten to turn on that on/off switch, but it didn't work because she knew i wasn't sleeping, i had tried to call her an hour before she had called me. it's not easy to sleep when you're closing your store. there aren't enough hours in the day and there aren't enough books off of the shelves to warrant any feelings of relief. anyone a doctor or massage therapist that can either prescribe me something to take to sleep or give me a great back rub to put me to sleep? just a few hours would be great.

today's agenda is just boxing up some more books to send back to the publishers, those that i am pretty sure nobody is going to buy at this point. it's a relief to only be here til four in a way because i have to be at cogans and it will be busy enough to keep my mind off things because of the greening of ghent. eleanor is off to celebrate colston's birthday in charlottesville. she'll no doubt be book shopping, i went up there with pete a few months ago and we spent rediculous amounts of time in bookstores. there's no better place to escape.

-susie