After giving it a lot of thought, I've decided not to pursue the business that's for sale. I looked at the income from the store and realized that I could either work ~70 hours a week for at least the next two years with minimal time off; or hire someone, which would result in making almost no money for roughly two years (after coming up with the money to purchase the store). A not insignificant factor was the blurb above -- even if I were inclined to work long hours or for very little money if it were just the two of us, if we're successful at our attempt at pregnancy, I would want to be able to see my child(ren) and to not be worried financially. The business likely will be sold before we'd know about our efforts at pregnancy, though if it's still on the market at that time, I may quickly revisit the issue. As suggested by my earlier post, one thing that wasn't a factor was Kathy -- she's been incredibly supportive of my looking into this opportunity. I think she might even be a bit more disappointed than I am that it doesn't seem to work for us.
Much as we love Junebug, she's recently entered a phase that's really starting to piss us off. Last week, for the first time since we renovated our kitchen, she figured out how to open the dog food drawer and help herself. We tried holding the door closed with bungee cords, but to no avail, so we've had to put the food back into a closet, which is something of a pain. Today I came home and found out that she's figured out how to open the pantry, and that she had attacked several open boxes of cereal and gotten the rawhides down off a shelf about as tall as she is long. Needless to say, her methods of opening the drawers and the pantry cause some damage to the doors, which makes us very unhappy (expletives omitted) given that we got very nice cabinetry when we renovated the kitchen less than two years ago! I think we'll be able to keep her out in the future, but I expect there to be some additional damage before she decides she can't get in.
Rather than bore any of you with a full review of Pratchett's latest Discworld novel (I've reviewed two of his others), I'll simply say that Pratchett fans will be delighted to see a new story about Sam Vimes and the Watch. The rest of you should avoid this book until you've read the many earlier books concerning Sam, many of which are better than this one, and all of which provide context. It's not a bad book -- there are the standard conversion of elements of our world to the Discworld equivalents (a new trend is taking place among the young dwarfs, consisting of them carrying additional battle axes, and other such war-based paraphenalia -- it's called "clang"). And Sam is one of my favorite characters out there. But where the story to Night Watch (the last Discworld story centered on Sam) sizzled, this one doesn't come together as well. As for the other recurring characters, sadly Lord Vetinari has nothing more than a cameo in this one, though Captain Carrot, Angua, Nobby and the rest of them are entertaining as always. Rating: 7/10And if you can stand one more bearded photo, this one is right up there with Mr. Flu's:
