Wind, you are my mortal nemesis.
For the second time in less than a month 85mph+ gusts were blowing in Colorado Springs. No one I’ve talked to remembers many wind incidents like these — I can’t recall anything like this in my nearly five years living in the Colorado Front Range — and now we’ve had two in a matter of weeks.
Both stores are closed on Mondays so, at the very least, there was no concern of customers or their vehicles being hurt on our property. But there were electrical poles and power lines down throughout the whole city, and many have been without power since early this morning. It’s about 7 in the evening as I’m writing this and — fingers crossed — Colorado Springs Utilities hopes to have electricity flowing again in our area by 9PM. In our little corner of the Springs alone, a sparsely populated 3 square mile (approximately) neighborhood known as Ivywild, more than 800 homes and businesses were without power.
Many businesses can get by without power. But one of our stores also houses a parrot rescue, and without electricity there’s no heat to keep them warm. So my wife had to drive about 55 miles down to Colorado Springs in heavy winds to temporarily relocate almost 50 birds. Fortunately, Pikes Peak Humane Society is just a couple of miles down the road for the store and the wife has maintained a very good relationship with them. They were kind enough — in their large, beautiful facility resplendent with backup generators — to take on the birds until it’s safe for them to come back. Two volunteers also braved the bad weather and they got everyone settled in their short-term digs within a few hours.
The wind also managed to strip a decent amount of siding off the south side of the big store. Tomorrow we’ll have a better understanding of the extent of that damage. But if it’s significant, that would be bad news, as our insurance deductible for wind is $5,000 and this would be our second claim in less than a month. So it’s likely that despite insurance, wind damage will end up costing us in the ballpark of $10,000 cash in a four week period.
Who wants to be an entrepreneur?
In the meantime, in the sexy and exciting world of a small business marketing agency, our theme of the day was “almost.” We almost finished a beautiful bilingual site for a nonprofit, but a software update caused an error which we now have to resolve. Our priority today was completing a site for the Denver Biz Tech Expo. Did we do it? Well, almost. We were supposed to get written content from the client last night but he lost his car keys while skiing in the mountains yesterday and spent a good chunk of the night trying to get himself back home. Miserable situation for him, but now we need to shuffle the rest of our week. We also almost launched a site for an engineering firm, but discovered accidentally that there is a whole bunch of content on the old site that we didn’t realize needed to be migrated.
Unfortunately, it’s just been one of those days.
When stuff like this starts to pile up, I start looking for “little things” I can easily clear. I managed to knock out the remainder of the design work on a website for a market research firm, kill a couple of little graphics projects, and get a client locked in on a Google AdWords strategy. My team was chipping away at a few other things and so progress has been made.
But I still get uncomfortable and see so many “almost” projects teetering on the edge. There’s a natural flow of things in a firm like ours, things are always starting and finishing. But if we don’t get some of the almost stuff off our plates, we’re going to get to a point where new projects will get logjammed.
Hopefully we don’t get to that point but after days like today I definitely worry.
A bright spot though… Now 8:10 and the power seems to be back on in both stores.