For the obligitory January cold snap here in the Ozarks. Currently, temps are below freezing, and it's not going to get better for a few days. It's so cold, I'm not even tempted to TRY to do dishes. We're doing the paper plates and plastic silverware routine so I don't have to worry about it. I did manage to make it through work, though I just about fell asleep standing up doing it because I was so tired from fighting off another attack of stomach flu the night before. I'm still not all that awake, but I have to get myself in gear and ready to rock and roll pretty soon.
I did get a bit of needlework done yesterday, just not a lot, from not feeling too great. Still trying to get Mom's lap quilt done so I can do the assembly and such, but not getting much of anywhere with it last night because my finger was hurting from all the stitching the day before. Hand stitching through that heavy material is not easy nor comfortable on the fingertips!! But she's worth everything that I'm going through for that qulit, and I know she'll love it. Hubby is concerned that she will put it away and not use it. I know Mom, she'll use the dickens out of it.
Please keep my daughter's friend's family in your thoughts and prayers. Not only did her friend commit suicide recently, but over last Saturday, his father passed as well. To quote her, "I can't even imagine what his mother must be experiencing, but the family needs all the support they can get right now."
But time for work ... even though I could likely use about another six or eight hours of sleep, apparently, because I feel just that tired. Thank goodness hubby does most of the driving. I need to get the webstore stuff going so I can bleeding well do all I want to do once it's going well. That means working my store, making stuff, dropshipping stuff (mostly dropshipping, thank goodness), writing, gardening, keeping up the house, etc. So I'm off for the day - see you guys! Hugs, everybody!
*****
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
Tuesday, January 6, 2015
I'm pooped
I got enough time to rest last night, but not a lot of sleep. I'm having a bit of nasty stuff, and it's not fun. I was up a couple times during the night, and it took me a bit of time to get back to sleep, so I'm short on sleep. It's going to be interesting tonight at work, assuming I can wake up enough to be safe to drive myself in. Hubby is taking the truck and letting me drive myself, because if I get sicker at work or whatever, I can drive myself straight home instead of having to sit at the plant and wait on him to get done with work. Or worse, me try to drive that big truck home myself and feel up to going back in with the car to pick him up after work. When one of us doesn't feel totally great, it makes much more sense to use the extra gas and both vehicles, just in case.
On the other hand, I did get a bunch of free patterns, mostly crochet, downloaded from a torrent last night, and got a lot done on putting the back together for Mom's lap quilt. Since I haven't got a sewing machine right now, I'm having to do even THAT by hand, and my finger I use to push the needle through is a bit sore, despite using a thimble. I did discover one thing odd though. I'm using my lighted magnifier to make sure I have enough light to see what I'm doing easily, and my stitches look huge under the magnification. In actuality, the stitches are darn near machine stitch size. Yeah, I'm just that good. The majority of the sewing to piece the back together is done, so there's just that to finish and then I can assemble, baste and quilt the thing. I love it, but it's one project I will be glad to have done.
*****
On the other hand, I did get a bunch of free patterns, mostly crochet, downloaded from a torrent last night, and got a lot done on putting the back together for Mom's lap quilt. Since I haven't got a sewing machine right now, I'm having to do even THAT by hand, and my finger I use to push the needle through is a bit sore, despite using a thimble. I did discover one thing odd though. I'm using my lighted magnifier to make sure I have enough light to see what I'm doing easily, and my stitches look huge under the magnification. In actuality, the stitches are darn near machine stitch size. Yeah, I'm just that good. The majority of the sewing to piece the back together is done, so there's just that to finish and then I can assemble, baste and quilt the thing. I love it, but it's one project I will be glad to have done.
*****
Monday, January 5, 2015
Sad start to the year
Not for us, but for others. My daughter, over the weekend, lost a friend to suicide, and Mom called today, because Aunt Liz's youngest, my cousin Jackie, lost her husband to unknown-at-present causes over the weekend. The tragic part of that one is that Jackie and her husband had waited to find the right person, planned and had the perfect wedding for them, and they just got married back in mid-October. From what Mom said, Jackie came home from work, found him in his chair, and thought at first that he was sleeping. She was so wigged out over it, the cops had to call Aunt Liz and Uncle Mike. What an AWFUL way to start the year.
For us, it's back to work as normal today, which is fine, because to get where we want to be, money is essential. One big thing I highly recommend when you are starting your own online business as we (mostly me, because hubby is definitively NOT tech-savvy ... his phone is about as technical as he can get) are doing, is do not quit your day job. Put an hour or so a day into getting rolling and it all builds up. But by doing so, you keep an income flowing so bills can keep being paid, and things can get done, but you get your business going as well. That is essential. It's not a lot of fun to have a business and be starving or without heat and lights because your business isn't off the ground yet and you have no money to pay for things you need.
As for "winter homesteading," over the weekend, when the winds weren't too bad, hubby went out despite the cold and got warmed up really well by cutting some wood to stove length. As we have about six or seven orders for ricks of wood, we need to get busy making big logs and smaller logs/kindling. Like we've said, even for ourselves, if all you have is one to two inch logs, you just stuff the stove full of them, and they'll burn a good long time. Shoot, by the time you get done splitting, you usually don't have pieces much bigger than that anyhow. Me, I did a lot of stitchery. I FINALLY got the last butterfly done on the lap quilt top, so my next step is to get the backing material out and cut the pieces for the backing and sew them together. As the material is more than long enough, but not quite wide enough, I need to cut two pieces and sew them together to make one piece for the backing. Then its assembly and basting and quilting and binding ... then it will be done. I also got the fourth panel done on the mile a minute scrap afghan, and a bit done on one of the baby bibs I will be putting up for sale when they are finished. So a LOT is getting done, which is GREAT!
*****
For us, it's back to work as normal today, which is fine, because to get where we want to be, money is essential. One big thing I highly recommend when you are starting your own online business as we (mostly me, because hubby is definitively NOT tech-savvy ... his phone is about as technical as he can get) are doing, is do not quit your day job. Put an hour or so a day into getting rolling and it all builds up. But by doing so, you keep an income flowing so bills can keep being paid, and things can get done, but you get your business going as well. That is essential. It's not a lot of fun to have a business and be starving or without heat and lights because your business isn't off the ground yet and you have no money to pay for things you need.
As for "winter homesteading," over the weekend, when the winds weren't too bad, hubby went out despite the cold and got warmed up really well by cutting some wood to stove length. As we have about six or seven orders for ricks of wood, we need to get busy making big logs and smaller logs/kindling. Like we've said, even for ourselves, if all you have is one to two inch logs, you just stuff the stove full of them, and they'll burn a good long time. Shoot, by the time you get done splitting, you usually don't have pieces much bigger than that anyhow. Me, I did a lot of stitchery. I FINALLY got the last butterfly done on the lap quilt top, so my next step is to get the backing material out and cut the pieces for the backing and sew them together. As the material is more than long enough, but not quite wide enough, I need to cut two pieces and sew them together to make one piece for the backing. Then its assembly and basting and quilting and binding ... then it will be done. I also got the fourth panel done on the mile a minute scrap afghan, and a bit done on one of the baby bibs I will be putting up for sale when they are finished. So a LOT is getting done, which is GREAT!
*****
Sunday, January 4, 2015
Chilly!!!!
It's below freezing out today and all day, barely above freezing the next few days. That polar chill is not fun when you're used to winter days in the 40s and 50s, but thank goodness for plenty of blankets and afghans. Especially the afghans. The house is old enough that insulation isn't that good in the walls anymore, so it gets pretty cool when temps drop below freezing like this. It stays at least in the mid-50s in the house, so it's not horrible, but it isn't great, either. It's survivable, basically, but we're okay with it. This is the third winter we've gone through here, and truthfully, I'd rather deal with this than the mess we dealt with at our last place. Drunks, druggies, and no space to speak of. I'll gladly haul in water, use a sawdust toilet and be occasionally cool during the winter months in order to avoid all the negatives of the last place.
Mom's lap quilt top is done, barring a bit more backstitching. I finished the cross-stitching at the laundromat today and am finishing the backstitching up while I download a few torrents of free patterns. A zip file would have been much faster, but sometimes, you just gotta deal with what ya gotta deal with. There are four of them, too, at a total of about 4.5 GIG of patterns in PDF files. Whew. Going to take a while to get all of them downloaded, that is for sure!
Otherwise, I'm enjoying almost having the lap quilt done, looking forward to getting more done on the mile a minute afghan, and looking through seed catalogs for what I want to get this year. Yay me.
*****
Mom's lap quilt top is done, barring a bit more backstitching. I finished the cross-stitching at the laundromat today and am finishing the backstitching up while I download a few torrents of free patterns. A zip file would have been much faster, but sometimes, you just gotta deal with what ya gotta deal with. There are four of them, too, at a total of about 4.5 GIG of patterns in PDF files. Whew. Going to take a while to get all of them downloaded, that is for sure!
Otherwise, I'm enjoying almost having the lap quilt done, looking forward to getting more done on the mile a minute afghan, and looking through seed catalogs for what I want to get this year. Yay me.
*****
Saturday, January 3, 2015
Getting a late start
Because hubby decided I needed the sleep and let me sleep in an extra hour. I appreciate it, but I have so much to do, and I really wanted to get stuff done. Oh well. Just means I spend a bit more time on things tomorrow, on my one day off, and tonight after I get home from work. Weather continues not great, lots of rain yet though it's slowed to a light drizzle. All this is not good, as temps are supposed to drop possibly to single digit wind chills tonight after dark, so the mountain road won't be just muddy but icy as well, along with main roads icy. So he'll be driving me to work again tonight as well as picking me up. We hate using the extra gas for the double round trips, but we'd rather be safe than sorry, too. Temps tomorrow aren't supposed to be that good, either, not even above freezing for the high. Looks like a major cold front has decided to hit us, so I'm glad for all the warm blankets we have.
So I'm behind schedule for the day, and considering I have to work again, it's not a good way to start the day, but I guess I needed the rest or I wouldn't have fallen back to sleep so deeply. So much to do, so little time to do it. Work news, depending on who you talk to, we either are or are not shutting down in February after all. We'll find out in a few more weeks, and in the meantime, we just keep on socking away what we can and go from there. If we do, we'll at least be partially covered for it. If we don't, so much the better, we'll be ahead a bit on getting the downpayment together for hubby's teeth to get done!
*****
So I'm behind schedule for the day, and considering I have to work again, it's not a good way to start the day, but I guess I needed the rest or I wouldn't have fallen back to sleep so deeply. So much to do, so little time to do it. Work news, depending on who you talk to, we either are or are not shutting down in February after all. We'll find out in a few more weeks, and in the meantime, we just keep on socking away what we can and go from there. If we do, we'll at least be partially covered for it. If we don't, so much the better, we'll be ahead a bit on getting the downpayment together for hubby's teeth to get done!
*****
Friday, January 2, 2015
Holiday fun's over
So it's back to work for me, today and tomorrow. As hubby arranged for a vacation day for today, he automatically gets tomorrow off as well, meaning he has a five-day "vacation" right now. Argh. I need a vacation. A permanent one. I'm seriously looking into opening a standalone website with a store and all, while still doing the blog. I can still cross-post things like events, photos, etc., to the blog pages, while mainly working on the webstore, and using the hosting there for photo storage and such. This would eliminate the need to worry about space on photobucket, or my gmail, etc., or having to upload photos to FB - I can just link to them from there. A lesson I learned a long time ago is that you take maybe half an hour a day to work on something like that and get it done, and go from there.
So, over the next several weeks, I'm going to be spending a tiny bit of time each day photographing something I've got ready to go, and writing up a description of it, so that when I get the site finally going, I can have things ready to list for sale. Only reason to do that now is so that getting stuff set up for sale won't take so long once I buy the domain and install the shopping cart software and all. Honestly, I have a bunch of things to put up, and I don't have photos for everything. I need these ahead of time to get SOMETHING going. Then it's just work on other things as I go and add them a bit at a time. My little ebooks don't take long to write, so that would be a new one every week or two going up for sale as a digital item. I get some sales of my ebooks through Amazon, but seriously, there's so much competition there, it's ridiculous. Ditto Etsy and eBay ... everybody's storefront looks pretty much the same. In order to make this work, I have to stand out.
And I have so many things I can make to sell. Crafting (ornaments of all kinds, picture frame magnets, magnets period - mostly cheap foam crafts, but still, it's quick money), finished needlework and patterns, my little ebooks on homesteading and gardening and DIY how-tos, and jewelry I make, soaps, candles, seeds, my gag gift baskets from one of my ebooks, and my favorite of the Gifts (Not) In A Jar. Maybe baked goods for local customers only. Eventually, there will also be a section for needlecraft supplies, like yarn, needles and hooks, and other patterns. Yep, I got LOTS of plans, lol. I just have to make a little time every day to work on them. Thank goodness for weekends, as I can make a little MORE time then. And eventually, it will replace my job and I know I will be happier, because I'll be doing what I love to do. Staying home, keeping house, and crafting in all kinds of ways.
That's not to say I won't be doing SOME affiliate income stuff. I think ones like Leisure Arts or Annie's Attic or the like would be cool to have their banners floating. It wouldn't be much extra income, but every little bit would help. I have a lot of planning done, lots of writing done to figure out how I want things to flow. Half an hour a day for a month of designing and re-designing and moving things around will do that for you, so hopefully, things will flow nicely once I get it up and running. Wish me luck!!
*****
So, over the next several weeks, I'm going to be spending a tiny bit of time each day photographing something I've got ready to go, and writing up a description of it, so that when I get the site finally going, I can have things ready to list for sale. Only reason to do that now is so that getting stuff set up for sale won't take so long once I buy the domain and install the shopping cart software and all. Honestly, I have a bunch of things to put up, and I don't have photos for everything. I need these ahead of time to get SOMETHING going. Then it's just work on other things as I go and add them a bit at a time. My little ebooks don't take long to write, so that would be a new one every week or two going up for sale as a digital item. I get some sales of my ebooks through Amazon, but seriously, there's so much competition there, it's ridiculous. Ditto Etsy and eBay ... everybody's storefront looks pretty much the same. In order to make this work, I have to stand out.
And I have so many things I can make to sell. Crafting (ornaments of all kinds, picture frame magnets, magnets period - mostly cheap foam crafts, but still, it's quick money), finished needlework and patterns, my little ebooks on homesteading and gardening and DIY how-tos, and jewelry I make, soaps, candles, seeds, my gag gift baskets from one of my ebooks, and my favorite of the Gifts (Not) In A Jar. Maybe baked goods for local customers only. Eventually, there will also be a section for needlecraft supplies, like yarn, needles and hooks, and other patterns. Yep, I got LOTS of plans, lol. I just have to make a little time every day to work on them. Thank goodness for weekends, as I can make a little MORE time then. And eventually, it will replace my job and I know I will be happier, because I'll be doing what I love to do. Staying home, keeping house, and crafting in all kinds of ways.
That's not to say I won't be doing SOME affiliate income stuff. I think ones like Leisure Arts or Annie's Attic or the like would be cool to have their banners floating. It wouldn't be much extra income, but every little bit would help. I have a lot of planning done, lots of writing done to figure out how I want things to flow. Half an hour a day for a month of designing and re-designing and moving things around will do that for you, so hopefully, things will flow nicely once I get it up and running. Wish me luck!!
*****
Thursday, January 1, 2015
Happy New Year!
So far, so good. We had to run a few errands today, and that took some time from sitting here stitching on the lap quilt. The last butterfly is ALMOST done, and I really need to get it finished so it can get out to Mom, hopefully in time for her birthday. I have teeny bits of three more colors to do, and a big bunch of fill-in on a fourth, then the backstitching and it's done. Then there's just assembly, basting, quilting, sewing up the edge, binding, and it will finally be done. I think I'll have a bit of a cry when that happens, because I've put so much time and effort and love into this, and I hate to see projects finish. But finishing one means I can start another!!!!
We have already had a blessing this year. Hubby delivered a last load of wood yesterday and the guy who bought it had an older Suburban that he was junking out. The tires weren't that old and were in really good shape, plus are 10-ply off-road tires. We are swapping two cords of cut, split wood for the tires. I do love bartering. We needed the tires, though. The front ones on the truck were getting pretty bad, and we had no idea how we were going to get new ones since the ones we need to get for the truck are $200 each! So this is a blessing. There's plenty left in the wood pile for another load, which comes out to about a rick (half a cord), more or less. Hubby will have to sharpen chainsaws for us both so we can get busy and get more stuff cut up. The guy specifically requested that one load be nothing but smaller stuff for kindling and such, so that means a lot of work for me!
*****
We have already had a blessing this year. Hubby delivered a last load of wood yesterday and the guy who bought it had an older Suburban that he was junking out. The tires weren't that old and were in really good shape, plus are 10-ply off-road tires. We are swapping two cords of cut, split wood for the tires. I do love bartering. We needed the tires, though. The front ones on the truck were getting pretty bad, and we had no idea how we were going to get new ones since the ones we need to get for the truck are $200 each! So this is a blessing. There's plenty left in the wood pile for another load, which comes out to about a rick (half a cord), more or less. Hubby will have to sharpen chainsaws for us both so we can get busy and get more stuff cut up. The guy specifically requested that one load be nothing but smaller stuff for kindling and such, so that means a lot of work for me!
*****
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