January 3. Tuesday Night.

Hi Journey.

Tea Time next week; that means rest of January it's super-busy at the shop.

Woke up early this morning. A sleepy shard of fear poked through right as I woke up and made me wonder: Can I carry through another year? New Years resolve is all well and good, but c'mon, girl, you know deep down inside you might as well pick up that Ace the MBA Exam book right now and get back to studying. It's the only thing you were really good at, anyway.

I shook it off, like usual. Doubt is a leech that sucks the soul away a little at a time.

I tugged on the Nikes and went for the first run of the year. Leeches have a hard adhering when it's below freezing. Stepped on the scale after my shower. Looks like I've only gained two pounds over the Holidays. Not bad.

Today is the first day of that looong stretch between now and Memorial Day without any holidays for my staff. We start the year off with a bang, going full-steam ahead with the Tea Time reviews starting next week until the end of the month. I've learned not to do expect too much this week; most clients are still mentally recovering from the past six weeks of binging on spending and eating. By next week a third of them will be on a diet or at a gym.

It's the perfect time to start them to thinking about what they want to do with their home in the upcoming years.

See Journey, clients have two types of lifetime value: the amount money they spend with you and the amount of money they refer to you. Most businesses milk the former dry but never even tweak the teat of the latter.

Tea Time easily gives me a fivefold return on my time and a hundredfold return on the money we spend on snacks and coffee and, yes, tea.

Staff wasn't too sluggish for first day back at work. I think most of them are ready to get back to a more normal work routine. I will be, once Tea Time is over.

Case and I traded a few emails last few days. Didn't seem our time zones or our stars aligned for a good time to talk live. Maybe next week. Julian flew back to USA today. He says he needs to take care of some business with an old employer, plus he's going to try and drum up some more funding for some astronomy research project, or some such. It sounded a bit convoluted; I asked why he didn't just come home for the Holidays and see his family and she didn't really have a good answer. She says he has to go to some conference back home and present a paper so he is going to take an extended trip and just see his family after.

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