Status Reports & Other Ramblings

(actual photo of me trying to work today)

HELLO MONDAY I HAVE A FEVER WHEEE. I’m okay, it’s just a cold and not even that bad of one aside from the thing where my body can’t pick a temperature, but I am VERY not smart today so I’ve retreated to bed with sudafed and tissues and a pile of blankets that I’m tossing onto the floor every few minutes. 

(My thermometer says I don’t actually have a fever, but it also won’t switch back to Fahrenheit and beeps incessantly and won’t turn off unless I yank the battery out, so I’m thinking it’s an unreliable narrator.)

Last week I... didn’t do very much, because Yom Kippur. Although I did order 123 pieces of labradorite and rather a lot of opal beads, and I’ve decided that everyone who’s in the Earring Club come October 1st will get opals next month. And if you aren’t already in the Earring Club, you can fix that today for a mere $5...

(YOU get opals, and YOU get opals, and EVERYBODY gets opals! Unless you don’t like opals, in which case you confuse me a lot but please let me know and I will send you something that isn’t opals.)

Oh! I have also just restocked the extremely goth bat earrings, and I added some very cute knitting-themed design-your-own earrings, and stickers featuring Smol Panther have arrived and are going out in every order:  

And I found a really cool Victorian writing desk that is now my new workbench, and I’m kinda mad that I’m not downstairs admiring it right now. 

HELLO MONDAY! I woke up with a worse-than-usual hand tremor this morning, so I ended up changing my plans for the day around a bit. The tremor is one of the lingering side effects of the brain tumor, and while I've gotten very good at working around it by just moving more slowly and/or bracing my forearms against a table, it still slows me down enough that I get easily frustrated. 

Not much happened last week thanks to Rosh Hashanah, although I did finish up a couple of awesome custom orders including a spooky version of a Victorian Circus necklace, and I got in a shipment of fall-themed charms, some of which made it into earrings already: [pomegranates] [pumpkins] [garlic]

Somewhere before Rosh Hashanah I did yet more inventory organizing, so now you can see JUST the available earrings! Or pendants! Or bracelets! Or necklaces!

(No, I still haven't found more of the Victorian Circus beads, but I did find a source for vintage beads in similar styles, and I'll probably be ordering those tonight while I wait for my Ambien to kick in. WHEEE BEADS. Might also order some opals, too. We'll see.)

Yom Kippur starts tomorrow night, so I'm preemptively blocking out the rest of the week for that plus recovery, because Yom Kippur is basically three operas back to back and on top of that I seem to somehow be running sound now too? I might be back at work on Friday but I'm not counting on it; Rosh Hashanah knocked me out for a full day longer than I expected, which I blame on the excitement of discovering that the rabbi's microphone was broken AFTER she started the service.

(And by excitement I mean I ordered backup microphones for both the rabbi and cantor as soon as I got home and also now soundchecks are mandatory and must be done at least half an hour before sunset.)

ANYWAY. I will be shipping tomorrow morning, so any orders that come in by the time I get home from taking the short person to school should go out by noonish. After that, expect delays; I'll either be singing or asleep or possibly both. Hopefully not troubleshooting mysteriously non-working microphones, though. 

(If this post is more disjointed than usual, it's because I was trying to play Go Fish with the short person. She won, but I'm pretty sure she cheats.)

Yes. Yes I did.

Two or three times on rather a lot of it, even, because apparently the save button on the bulk editor thingie actually means "start saving but don't give any indication that going to the next page will cause all your work to be lost" NO I'M NOT CRANKY WHY DO YOU ASK.

Anyway. Today I finally got around to organizing every blessed thing on this website by what type of thing it is, which means an oft-requested feature is finally available: you can look at JUST the available earrings! Or pendants! Or bracelets! Or necklaces!

(Eventually I'll figure out a way to make it show a miscellaneous category too, for stuff like hair toys and rings and whatsits. But I'm all out of brain right now and the filtering options available to me are... kind of terrible, honestly.)

I will probably be working a bit tomorrow, but then I'll be offline from Sunday through Tuesday for Rosh Hashanah, and probably Wednesday too because basically I'm singing three operas and also I'm in charge of the new sound system so I'm pretty sure I will need to be asleep on Wednesday. 

(Shanah Tovah to those of you also celebrating! The rest of you, uh... happy second week of September, I guess?)

...here, have a cat in a box. 

The Tiny Evil Genius went back to school this morning, which means I finally get to nap work without anybody telling me about Pokémon or asking me for a snack the second I pick up my pliers.

(No fewer than four hair elastics, three bobby pins, and two kinds of hair products were involved in getting her hair braided and out of her face this morning. I'm betting it will be completely loose by lunchtime. If anyone has tips for keeping flyaway waist-length hair contained on a child who obsessively fidgets with her hair and never stops moving, I'm aaaaaall ears...)

And what am I doing with my first day of freedom? Packing orders! 

JUST LOOK AT ALL THOSE LOVELY BARCODES. So organized! So much less stressful when I don't have to read each item number three times!

(Dyslexia and brain damage is NOT a good combination, y'all.)

So, let's see - what did I do last week? Printed barcode labels, mostly. Un-jammed the thermal printer at least four times. Found more shinies that never made it to the website. Said quite a lot of bad words.

Also I set up not one but TWO layaway/payment plan services, so now if you want to put something on hold and/or make payments over a period of time you don't even need to talk to me about it. 

Speaking of holds, I have NO idea who BC is and can't find any record of their request, so I can't nudge them about their hold on this piece. If you are BC, could you please let me know by Friday if you still want it? 

That's about all the news from over here, I think. If you need me I will just be over here packing orders in blissful, blissful silence. Or maybe napping, since I have a choir rehearsal tonight that will run a MINIMUM of 3 hours, and that's not counting rehearsing my duet and going over the Torah portion I'm chanting on Yom Kippur...