Wednesday has become my favorite work day. It’s the day I reserve to catch up on the things I don’t get around to on other days. It’s far enough from Monday that most of that trauma is behind me, and it’s not close enough to the weekend to tempt me to start shutting down early. I have Tuesday chores and Thursday chores, but on Wednesday I fine tune the to-do list. Sometimes that’s the only thing that makes it work at all.

Anyway, today was good and productive, even though we’re still getting used to the kennel business. Every day brings a new set of questions, but I’m getting better at finding answers. Someone faxed me a set of signature pages from an affidavit, without sending me the text of the document. I had no idea what these people were signing and why I was getting it, but I tracked down the answer.

It turns out we have to keep on file our employees’ acknowledgment that they’ve read all the rules about not selling alcohol to minors. (Yes, we sell liquor in the kennel. Tobacco, too. I feel dirty.) All I have to do is find a place to keep these signatures on file, so that when the truth squad descends on us, we can avoid the fine. (I hope. I haven’t actually met any of the kennel crew, so for all I know they would sell dope to first graders. I assume they’ve been vetted.)

We also know have workers’ compensation insurance in place. I think we’re supposed to hold regular first aid seminars and post safety regulations before we’re fully covered, but I was blown away by the cost of this insurance.

We have three people, one who works Sundays only and two who work around the cages and the play yard. It’s costing us over $8,000 a year to keep them insured against workplace injuries. That’s almost as much as we pay for our ten-person construction crew that works for the other company (and they’re the ones with the real exposure). Amazing.

I’m gradually getting more comfortable writing checks out of the new checkbook, but I’m still not getting all the information I need. The deposits are made daily by our onsite employees, and they’re supposed to fax me copies of the deposit slips. That’s something we still have to work on, before I overdraw the account. So far that hasn’t been a problem, because a lot more has gone into the account than I’ve taken out of it.

In case you didn’t catch the rather broad hints I’ve dropped along the way, I hereby freely admit that The Kennel isn’t a kennel. The cages are actually berths and the puppies are boats. They play yard is an RV park. I think that’s as far as I’ll go, except to say that while I don’t own (part of) a kennel, I do own (part of) a m@r1n@. Got it?