Status Reports & Other Ramblings

THREE MORE SLEEPS UNTIL I GO ON VACATION WOO

(okay maybe four or five sleeps because let's be real, naps are a thing I do)

Aaaaaaaaanyway. I'm going to Wisconsin on Thursday for a music retreat, which is something I kind of desperately need right now because the world is awful and being a single parent is exhausting and winter is rapidly approaching and I'm tired, y'all.

I'll be spending the next couple of days wrapping up custom labradorite orders (if you called dibs on a piece of labradorite and haven't told me what you want it to be yet, speak now or hold your peace for a week) and getting shinies out the door. I've got a few new things going up on the website later today, including some really pretty carved peach and silver moonstone leaves and a couple of black opals) and maybe some more opal earrings, we'll see.

Also! Today is a momentous day! Three years ago on this very day, Smol Panther arrived on our doorstep, attitude and all: 

"NO MORE CATS" I said sternly, as I let the child put out a bowl of kibble for the skinny creature who was twining around our ankles and mewing pathetically when we got home from school.

"NO MORE CATS" I said as my roommate and I conferred about what to do with a declawed black cat who showed up on our doorstep two days before Halloween.

"NO MORE CATS" I said as we scooped up her up and brought her inside and quarantined her in my office for the weekend to keep her safe. 

"NO MORE CATS" I said the following Monday as we bundled a bitey ball of black fur into a carrier and took her to the SPCA to have her scanned for the microchip that she didn't have. 

"NO MORE CATS" I said a week later as I took her to the vet for a checkup and shots so I could bring her out of quarantine in my office. 

...yeah, I lost that battle. 

When I get home from Wisconsin next week, the anniversary shenanigans will commence! WS is turning 13 this year, and... I have not figured out what I'm doing yet, as is the custom apparently. But there will be a sale, and some livestreaming, and it'll be fun, because it always is. 

Okay. Back to the workbench! 

Hello Monday! I, uh, missed a couple of weeks, but it's okay, nothing particularly interesting happened most of the time, aside from making this really pretty purple custom necklace: 

and a whole bunch of teensy vine pendants with opals for gifties:

And now it's Monday again and I've had a chai and assembled my new storage shelf for my bead cases and can't procrastinate any longer before actually starting to work, so here's a link roundup in handy list format:

• made lotsa stuff with opals 
  
  
• did a live unboxing of 40+ packages of very random stuff ordered by a bot
  
  
• did a live unboxing of 132 pieces of labradorite 
  
  
• took photos of the labradorite & put it up for dibsing
  
  
• made many pairs of opal earrings for people in the Earring Club
  
  
• and ordered a very pretty shoe rack to serve as bead storage:

(Let's just pretend that I closed the living room doors to keep the robot vacuum from wandering off and not to hide the fact that my child and her cat created a huge mess of art supplies in the dining room this weekend, okay? Great, good talk.)

Also continuing the trend of "I'm 40 and maybe I can actually afford to slowly start furnishing the house in something other than Curb-Dived Starving Artist Eclectic" I splurged a little on this mid century modern tray to go with my victorian writing-desk-turned-workbench (look, I'm still an artist, just not a starving one anymore) and it fits perfectly on my lap and is super useful for holding things while I'm working: 

(Also the pottery bowl holding spools of wire is something I utterly fell in love with at an art show a long time ago only to have my ex break it the same afternoon. She apologized profusely and promised to fix it so I could at least use it as a planter or something, but never did. I found the bag of shards in the basement recently and glued them back together and at some point I will gild the cracks because symbolism.)

Today's plan for work involves opals (in gold and copper, because I have stunning yellow opals and it's autumn) and labradorite (if you dibs'd something and haven't told me what you want it to be, now would be a good time to do that) and binge-watching Madam Secretary. (Can I please request a transfer to that timeline? I like it better than this one.)

(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.)