Mixing business with pleasure is always a challenging balance. Working a normal 9-5 job while trying to grow this little acrewd acorn into a flourishing business tree (yes, this analogy is weakening by the second) produces a vortex work/time effect. There never seems to be enough time and there is always more work to be done. So, anything that comes along that makes life a little easier is a welcome friend. MailChimp is one of those friends, and as I dip my toes into the email marketing pool it's been a surprisingly easy to use tool and actually kind of fun to work on. I've only been using it a short time, so when I received an email about a Customer Appreciation Party going on in Atlanta (combined with a willing best buddy to co-attend), it was a no-brainer that this would find itself on the schedule.

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Held at the Mason Murer Fine Art Gallery, this event featured all the fun things one would hope for right after leaving work. Businesses of all sizes are clients of MailChimp  (they sent over 3 billion emails last month) so I think the coolest thing was to see what kind of people are behind these local businesses and talk with them about what they do and what makes their little niche of the universe special. The rest of the time was spent checking out the different food trucks (yumbii was a fav!), sippin on some brews, snapping some pics with the Chimp and checking out an art gallery I truly didn't know existed. Sometimes these little breaks from the grind remind me why I would love acrewd to turn into something more. So that I'm not fighting to fit blogging, shopping, selling and growing a business into my schedule, but instead it will become my whole schedule. We all need a little refresher on what we're working towards, don't we? Oh, and I got a sweet cat hat too.

And now, some pics: