Monday, December 19th

Last night we picked up Unca Joe at the airport; Aunt Gay is – hopefully – flying in on Wednesday with Rusty. There’s been problem after problem getting him transferred, so everyone cross your fingers and hope that Santa provides the right paperwork and no more health scares. Gah.

I spent a good portion of the day yesterday running around. Chiropractor, massage (where my massage therapist tried out the massage lotion I may or may not bring into the HaldeCraft line, and she loved it so much that she immediately started suggesting fragrances and told me that I need to market it at the massage school here in town — good for my ego!), long trip to the post office (more on that in a second), and in between that trying to get some work done. A customer was coming by the house last night to pick up a rather large order. Mostly I’m wary of customers coming to the house for a variety of reasons (are they crazy? How do they know I’m not crazy? How clean is my house? Are they allergic to or afraid of cats and dogs?) but this one was an old friendstomer from Hanks, so it was all cool. I totally dropped the ball though and while I made the soap she wanted, I completely spaced on it once it was out of the mold — I made a lot of soap Friday or Saturday, but hadn’t had time to wrap it, so didn’t even think about it. Gah. I wound up wrapping the soap in front of her, but she was laughing the whole time. She’d just asked me online how I manage to do *everything* and here was a shining example of how I don’t. JOKE’S ON ME!

The post office. You know, I don’t like standing in line any more than anyone else. And maybe I tend to ignore people who ask the same questions over and over again “no, listen, do you SEE a stamp machine? Then obviously there is no stamp machine! This is a small post office! You would fucking see it if it were here, please stop asking every single person in line!” but I still start to grit my teeth after a while. Yes, all my packages are weighed and labeled already. And I feel for you that all you need is a stamp. But I don’t need much of anything either even though I’m carrying ten packages, so stop walking to the front of the line and arguing with the postal clerk about how you have to stand in line for 15 precious minutes out of your day to get a stamp. I don’t even need a stamp, and I’m not being an asshole. GET TO THE BACK OF THE LINE. All you are doing is holding up the entire line, and trust me, that postal clerk has no sense of humor about your problem, and honestly they will probably now move even more slowly just to piss you off! Gah. Is it Stockholm Syndrome? I’m actually starting to side with the postal workers. And yesterday, two of them took the time out of helping who they were helping to thank me for the homemade chocolate chip cookies I brought them last week. Here they are, getting crapped on by people who have had to deal with the fucked up construction in the road, the small parking lot, the long line, no stamp machine, and these two people are smiling huge smiles at me and telling me that they ate the SHIT outta those cookies and fought over the last one.

OK; time to plan my day. I need to stamp boxes and envelopes (I just had Tim stamp some for me at the beginning of December but I’m almost out again!). I need to clean some greenware and ready the kiln for whenever I can fire it next. I should wrap the soap I made for Christmas presents. and I’m meeting friends for knitting at 4. So I probably shouldn’t also try to make soap and dye yarn — I should really leave that for a day when I’m not doing so many other things and have a definite time cutoff. Whatever happened to that idea I had about only doing two things per day?!