Status Reports & Other Ramblings / status report

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...

The winter holidays are fast approaching, and so are holiday shipping deadlines! Please keep the following dates in mind, because your friendly neighborhood wirebender can only work so many miracles in any given day:

• if you would like your shinies to arrive before the first night of Hannukah (Tuesday, December 13th), the order must be placed no later than Sunday, December 3rd. No exceptions, because I will be at a conference and I haven't been able to teach the cats to pack orders.
   
• if you would like your shinies to arrive before the last night of Hanukkah (Tuesday, December 19th) it would be a really good idea to observe the previous shipping deadline, but you will probably be fine as long if your order is placed no later than Sunday, December 10th. Unless I come home from the conference with some sort of plague, which is entirely possible because, well, 5500 people in a convention center for 5 days. In New England. In December. (Wait. Who thought this was a good idea?)
   
• If you would like your shinies to arrive before Christmas Eve (Sunday, December 24th) the order must be placed no later than Friday, December 15th. Again, no exceptions; I am not a Time Lord. (Unless you want to pay $40 for overnight shipping, and yes, that is an exorbitant markup because I charge extra for things I don't want to do. Now you know.)
   
• If you somehow manage to forget about the existence of Christmas until December 19th, as someone inevitably does every single year (how? how is that possible? do you live under a rock??) your options are… a gift certificate or a larger gift certificate!
   
• If you live outside the United States, AHAHAHAHA good luck. Maybe try sacrificing a goat to your local gods? Or just buy a gift certificate, it’s much less messy and PETA probably won’t get mad at you unless they find out I’m not a vegetarian in which case… uh… you’re on your own here, actually.

As some of you may know or have noticed, I was out of the studio (and offline, most of the time) all of last week. A family friend died a week ago yesterday, and while I initially planned to go back to work after the funeral, I found myself too exhausted and sad to focus, and ended up taking the entire week off to sit shiva and let myself start to recover physically and emotionally. 

Mourning is not linear. I expected to cry the most at the funeral, but I somehow held it together that day, despite being asked to sing during the funeral. Instead, grief hit me the hardest on Thursday, and left me disoriented all weekend. I spent yesterday alternately doing chores that had been neglected all week - grocery shopping, cleaning, cooking - and reading, trying to get back to a place where I could focus on work.

Today is a different sort of disorientation: summer vacation has started, and instead of settling into my work day after driving my daughter to school, I'm trying to juggle work and an extremely chatty six-year-old who seems incapable of remembering that I've asked her to work on her own projects for more than about thirty seconds at a time.

I know I managed to do this last year, somehow; I'll get into the swing of it again soon enough, I suspect. But for now, I'm letting myself move slowly. A pair of earrings, a blog post, a commission, some work emails, paying bills, guitar practice - those are my goals today. Tomorrow maybe I'll be focused enough to get us to the park for a while before the worst of the heat sets in, to work under a tree while Claire plays. 

Life somehow goes on. This too shall pass. 

My toes are cold, I have Jingle Bells stuck in my head, I'm trying to figure out if I can avoid leaving the house for the next five weeks or so, the child and I are having our annual "we're Jewish, we don't need a Christmas tree, we have latkes" argument, and the forecast calls for frozen rain tomorrow: it must be the final days of November. And like every small business owner this time of year, I'm living on a steady diet of caffeine and ritalin right now. 

Speaking of which: if you want your shinies to arrive before December 24th, you need to place your orders NO LATER than December 18th. If you're ordering neckvines or anything else that I have to make, I'd recommend getting those orders in by December 15th; I'm doing my best to get everything out the door within 24-48 hours right now, but I'm a disabled single mom and I don't like to make promises I can't keep. 

After December 19th, your options become a gift certificate or... a gift certificate! Wait. Do I still have gift certificates? [investigates] Yes. Yes I do.

(Don't mind me, I just work here.)

Other dates to write on your calendars: I will be bringing back Instant Gratification Monday on December 5th and 12th! You'll be able to get shinies made while you wait, more or less. I might even manage to livestream one or both of them, if you'd like to find out just how often I yell "GET OUT OF THE BEADS" at a cat during my work day. Look for the first signup post to go up this coming Friday.

And in other news, I've been working on Christmas earrings the past few days.

And of course, some nice Jewish earrings too:

And some generic secular winter earrings:

Also I made a postmodern hipster giraffe in a Christmas scarf. You know. As you do.