The last week or so

If I didn’t take a photo every day I would never remember what I even did last week. If I were another person, I would be worried about Alzheimer’s… instead, I just ruefully shake my head and attribute it to stress and too much pot-smoking in college. Ahem. Not that I smoked pot. That would be illegal. : shifty eyes :

ANYWAY.

So; Arne was in town last week to “intern”… read, “learn how to make a home-based craft business work.” He was also pretty social, being that he is an old-school Gainesvillian (his parents still live here) and everyone wanted to gather to see him. Which was hiLARious when we went to Sweet Dreams to get ice cream on Wednesday night only to find out that they were doing a fundraiser and there were about 500 other people there. Yikes.

Mostly what we did was dye yarn.

We made soap one day, but the freaking humidity that had been causing me such soap issues was still around, so while we made stuff, we didn’t wrap anything. As an aside, I’ve made the executive decision to begin wrapping my Etsy soap differently; as soon as I unpack this little bag sealer I bought, and play with the heat gun, all soap for sale on Etsy will, instead of the first layer of wrapping being that food-grade thicker kraft paper, it will be in a shrink-wrapped bag. I’ve struggled with this decision for a while, as I feel that the selling point of my soap is the fragrance, and you won’t be able to smell it through the shrink-wrapped bag… but I’m just losing too much soap that I have stored here at the house. So soap that I store and sell on Etsy will be bagged, but then wrapped as usual on top of that. Soap for Wild Iris, which has a much faster turnaround, will be wrapped as I have been wrapping it, as it is sold in person and like I said, the fragrance is a big part of that. Soap for craft markets will be done the same way as well.

As you can see from that picture, I have a lot of yarn to wrap up this week!

I did have a little time for ceramics, which was good because I had a two-day craft market coming up at the end of the week. My focus was going to be on planters, but that didn’t work out the way I wanted it to. It wasn’t a total wash, as I had at least one of each of the planters I wanted to sell, and months ago I had made other ones and have been nursing baby plants in them — so on the table we had a planter with a plant, and a matching planter without a plant that was slightly lower priced. Also these new travel mugs that I plan on bringing in.

One major Gainesville happening this week was the kitchen fire at our favorite pizza place. Satchel’s had a small kitchen fire on… Tuesday, I think it was. Tim was helping our friends Craig and Rhea install a new countertop and putting the sink back in, in their new house, and it was getting close to 7 PM when I heard what sounded like every fire truck in the city screaming past. We live out by the airport so I thought it might be something out there, but I hadn’t heard any earth-shaking booms… and we also live near a school that gets a [prank] bomb threat every year or so but it was late at night, so… I wasn’t sure what it was. I knew it wasn’t me, thought, so I kept going on about my business. It was maybe an hour later that word starting making its way through the Facebook Gainesville peeps that Satchel’s had caught fire. Nobody was injured, and while it was a small fire… well, there’s no such thing as small damage when you have to chop up half the kitchen to find out where it is and put it out.

And here’s what my bitter black heart loves about this community; due to people on Facebook begging to donate, to give back to a place that has given them good food and good times, Satchel started a donation page. He set the goal to $20,000, as with 50 employees (between Satchel’s and Lighting Salvage) that is almost two weeks worth of payroll. Gainesville raised that for him in 24 hours. Think about that for a second. This small town, where we all pretty much live paycheck to paycheck, and how many people are out of work, or under-employed… and in 24 hours that much money was donated by people who care. Some were ex-pats who no longer live here but have fond memories. Some have never been there but are friends of people who are touched by this (imma lookin’ at you, Beth!). People gave. People care. That just really touches me. And of course I ran out to grab some salad dressing before Ward’s sold out, because now it looks like Satchel’s might be closed for three months while they completely renovate the kitchen. SALAD EMERGENCY!!!

This is turning into one of those 1000 word posts that I know everyone is going to stop reading… so I’ll make the rest brief.

Day one! I’ll go more into the event at Thornebrook when I do an official recap with all the photos I took. Suffice to say it was interesting to do both an event that was hours longer than what I’m used to, and also a two-day event at that. We rearranged the table some on the first day, after seeing how the flow of traffic was moving, and rearranged it even more on the second day to try to feature some items nobody touched on Saturday.

Day two! We were worried about the weather on Sunday. Saturday had seen massive gusts; we were outside, although I had requested a  spot under the walkway because I don’t (and likely never will) own a tent. The walkway was wide enough that we weren’t worried about getting directly rained on, but if it was that misty stuff that gets all over everything…? We would have lost all the soap to the dampness. So I didn’t bring much soap, but did bring my new hand and massage lotions! These garnered a lot of interest! Anyway, Sunday started off dreary but Mother Nature smiled on us and just as people were starting to show up, the sun broke and it stayed sunny, if extremely windy, all day.

Yesterday I really wanted to take a day off, maybe not even get out of my pajamas. However, I had an incredible amount of work to catch up on that I couldn’t get to last week. I had customers to email, custom pieces to work on, supplies to inventory and re-order (I am out of lip balm tubes!!!) and then there was unpacking from the event as well as unpacking supplies that I had ordered that came in last week and just sat there. I spent most of the day yesterday running around like the proverbial chicken with my head cut off, but juggling a lot of small balls paid off because I contacted everyone yesterday that I needed to answer, did the custom work, ordered a metric ton of supplies, and got everything a little more under control. I still need to unpack everything that’s sitting in the living room, but that and planning out my work schedule for the rest of March is really all that I need to do today. And then I get to head out to Wild Iris for social knitting at 4, and perhaps by then I will even have showered and gotten out of my pajamas. I’m sure my friends, and the Wild Iris/Cafe Colette staff will appreciate that, heh. Not that my flannel PJs aren’t cute, mind you; but I have a serious case of bed-head right now.

Oh! And I went and fed my friend’s cats yesterday, hence the picture of cats that clearly aren’t mine, in a setting that clearly isn’t my house. As you can see, the cats were extremely traumatized by a stranger in their midst. HAHAHA. Not. I’d been over to feed them before, and granted the first couple of times I came over, the cats were skittish, now they know me as “Auntie Food Bringer and Water Refiller” so they come right out when I walk in going “Kitties! Kitty-kitty-kitties!”

Ok. Done! Really! Did anyone read this whole thing…?