Status Reports & Other Ramblings / aspiring evil genius
Monday Tuesday morning roundup: back to school, back to work!
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...
robot overlord status: ACCOMPLISHED
As many of you already know from Facebook and possibly Twitter (I can't remember, it's 4 am and therefore I am not responsible for anything because this is an unholy hour of the morning and I have not had caffeine yet) the robotics kit has arrived, and lo, there was much rejoicing. And also a few temper tantrums because I made her follow the rules.
(I'm a mean mom. I also make her put away her own laundry and feed the pets. THE WORST, I tell you.)
The Tiny Evil Genius has successfully built and programmed the most basic starter robot, which was basically a fancy RC car, but hey, everybody has to start somewhere. She's presently partway through building a cat robot, which worries me; our real cats are bad enough. But maybe the cat robot can be put in charge of the real cats. That can't end badly, right?
Tiny Evil Genius has also expressed a desire to continue making jewelry, so you'll be seeing more of her work sooner or later. I gave her $10 to spend at the bead show this weekend and she came home with some really pretty stuff and some, um... kind of hideous stuff? But maybe she'll make them work, and if not, whatever, they were cheap and it's not like I've never made poor bead-buying choices or anything.
Thank you all for your orders and supportive comments and following along on this adventure. If you're a member of the new WS FB group (which you should be, because it's pretty fun) you can see a bunch of videos, including the robot unboxing and the first robot being built and programmed, with occasional cats and shiny things and general chaos.
Okay, it's now almost 5 am, which is still an unholy hour, and I'm going to go see if I can sleep for a couple of hours before I have to haul the Tiny Evil Genius to her horseback riding lesson. I wonder how long it will take her to put two and two together and try to convince me that if she makes enough earrings she could buy a horse... oh dear.
support an aspiring evil genius
Summer vacation with an extremely smart and extremely devious six-year-old has been... interesting thus far. And by interesting I mean I am deeply regretting not sending her to summer camp.
I've been attempting to redirect her obsession with Minecraft into an obsession with Legos, which has been largely successful. While looking up building instructions on the Lego website recently, we discovered that they're releasing a robotics kit next month.
Needless to say, my tiny mad scientist wants it. And because am not made of money and also firmly believe in teaching kids the value of work, I said she could get it if she earns the money for it, and I handed her a box of beads and some wire and told her to get busy.
I have to say, she did pretty darn well at it. I did the wire spirals and loops and put the earwires on, but she picked out the beads and arranged them herself, and then I gave her my phone and had her take photographs and crop the images, and she named each pair of earrings and helped me upload them to the website and will be packing up the orders when they sell.
I've been putting her to work in the studio since she was old enough to stuff candy and business cards into orders or sort beads, and her Montessori preschool class raised a flock of chickens and sold the eggs, so she already has a rough idea of what's involved in running a business; it will be interesting to see what she learns from being involved in every aspect from design to production to order fulfillment.
(We livestreamed the earring-making in the new WS Facebook group, if you'd like to get a look behind the scenes - I also highly recommend joining that group, if you haven't already, because it's a much more reliable way to get notifications of new shinies than the regular FB page. Plus, y'know, fun stuff like discussions and livestreams...)
So there you have it: feel free to support your friendly neighborhood junior mad scientist and her plans to build a robot army. This can't POSSIBLY go wrong...