Celebrating Eleven Years

Hubby and I celebrated our eleventh wedding anniversary last week. We're coming up on fifteen years together as a couple come September, and it dawned on us that we'll meet that "half our lives" together milestone in just a few years.

Taken Thanksgiving of 2002. We'd just announced our engagement.

How time flies!

Implementing Quarterly Goals

I've spent the last several years looking for a way to increase focus and productivity in my everyday and work life. I've tried daily, weekly, or monthly goals and gotten overwhelmed. On the other side of things, I tried making yearly goals and forgot about them. I'm going to shoot for a "happy medium" and try implementing quarterly goals.

I mean. I get some stuff done, but I need to do more!

Starting now, since April is the beginning of the second sales quarter of the year, I will post several goals to be met over the following three months. Then I'll come back at the start of the next quarter, reveal how I did, and list my goals for the following quarter. Y'all will keep me accountable, right?

Pied Piper iPad

It's no secret we've allowed the girls to use what electronics we have over the years. I've talked about "tech schooling" and the girls' computerized lessons off an on. I think I even might have mentioned vintage video game family nights a time or two. We've always tried to place limits, but still, the electronics call to them like the Pied Piper of the modern day, and we'd occasionally let them have "just a little" longer because a few moments of peace seemed worth it for days when work was particularly trying.

Sneak "teaching" a friend how to play a game when she was 3.

Hubby and I decided to implement more strict rules regarding screen time toward the end of spring break. With the distraction of illness and just trying to keep things running with one of us out of commission, we let them have way more time than usual. Being kids who still believe in "more is more," they took full advantage. Within a couple of days they began snapping at one another and fighting over games or movie picks and just showing a general lack of regard for one another as they got lost in an endless stream of entertainment. They were like addicts looking for their next hit, and we knew we had to put a stop to it right away.

Leaving Room for Flexibility

Last Tuesday, I was still dragging after the time change. We got a late start, and the girls and I never managed to catch back up. Then I realized I'd made a big mistake in my business model while we were eating lunch. I still needed to get a bunch of household chores done and writing time was supposed to start an hour and a half later. But I know myself well enough to know I'd forget if I didn't handle the issue right then.

So I rearranged the "time chunks" in my schedule to make room for this task, and I got to work. I still have my schedule, and I kept to my work day. I just left enough flexibility in my schedule to be able to adjust when I need an hour or two to handle issues that come up unexpectedly. If you run a small business, it's something you need. If you keep things too rigid, you'll drive yourself bonkers.

Fighting the Perfectionism Monster

I've written before about perfectionism and the problems it causes, specifically for the girls. I'm not so sure if I've touched on my own struggles with it, but in this case, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. I've been a perfectionist for as long as I can remember, and until recently, it's killed my productivity.

As long as I remember, if I started something, I wanted to finish it and make it just so. If doing that seemed impossible, I'd avoid starting altogether. It wasn't until I grew up and began reading articles on the internet that I learned this is common. Up until then, I just thought it was a personal flaw. But it makes sense. When you hold yourself to an impossible standard and get angry with yourself when you fail to meet it, not trying in the first place becomes very tempting. You can't mess up what you don't do, right?

Bribe vs. Earned Reward

How do you encourage a child to make the right decisions? Some parents are fond of using the carrot, and some seem to prefer the stick. I'm not going to touch on the "war" surrounding which "stick" measures are preferred or even allowable. Instead, today I want to look at the different methods of "carrot" one can employ.

Goal oriented, Sneak's never been afraid to work for what she wants.

When is a reward a bribe, and when is it something that's been earned? I think this is an important distinction when the goal is teaching your child a work ethic and intrinsic motivation. After all, when you break it down, what's a paycheck but a reward earned through a set period of work?

Longing for Nice Weather

This winter's been a bit warmer than it has been in the last few years, but it's been much wetter. We've had the occasional nice day. However, most have been rainy, windy, bitterly cold, or a mix of the three. Typical winter weather actually, when you look at it on the whole. It just makes you want to stay inside under the covers, and after nine or ten weeks of it, you can't help but begin to long for the return of nice weather.

The girls and I have been feeling it for a couple of weeks now. Sneak in particular is practically climbing the walls in anticipation. She's been begging to go to the park for two weeks straight, and she doesn't seem to understand not everyone is as hot natured as she is. Boo Bear and I feel the cold, and we feel it intensely.

Yet on days like this past Saturday, nice weather doesn't seem so far away. We woke up to frost, but it was warm enough to not need a jacket by lunchtime. The sun was shining so brightly, it hurt to walk outside without wearing shades.

So, the girls and I have come to a deal. If they can consistently finish their daily schoolwork within the allotted time, we'll make daily visits to the park, or at least the road that runs beside our house, for a walk when the weather cooperates. And if they can keep up with their lessons and chores without whining or fussing amongst themselves, we'll start going to the playground on Saturdays when the weather cooperates and we don't have other obligations.

If nothing else, we could all do with a bit of exercise and sunshine. Bring on the warm, sunny days of spring. We're ready.

Valentine's?

Everyone's been talking about Valentine's Day lately, and there've been heart shaped boxes of chocolates and whatnot on shelves almost since December 26. Am I the only one that just doesn't get it?

Valentine's Day confuses me.

If you enjoy the holiday and like celebrating it, more power to you. But it's something Hubby and I just can't get into. It feels too manufactured to actually be romantic, so we just skip it.

The Not Fun Part of Running a Business

We all have things we aren't good at, and for me, that's keeping up with my bookkeeping. You'd think I would have learned to keep on top of my accounting throughout the year by now, having worked freelance off and on for nearly a decade and running a small business since January 2011. But I'm that stubborn, or lazy as the case may be.

Our booth at Yomu_Con 2015 in Tuscaloosa, AL.

I'm good on the fun parts of the job, and even a few of the not so fun bits. I churn out a fair bit of high quality creative material. I handle customer service and what little bit of marketing we do. I schedule events and keep the store updated. But no matter how determined I am to do better at the start of every year, I invariably fall behind with entering all the store's sales and expenses in the ledger. Then I end up having to spend a good week or two come tax season combing through a huge bag of receipts, emails, balance sheets, sales records, etc. 

Dealing with Wintertime Blues

I've started dreading this time of year. It's not for any concrete reason, just that for the past seven or eight years, I always seem to end up in a funk towards the middle of February on into late March. I know there's such a thing as seasonal affective disorder (SAD), but I'm not going to say that's what it is. I don't know if it's so much the season itself, dread of things I've come to associate with the latter part of the school year plaguing my subconscious mind, backlash from the creative high during the holidays, or a combination of things. I just know it's a pain to deal with every late winter.

Making sure I get plenty vitamins and minerals helps. Opening the curtains and blinds all over the house to let in as much sunshine as possible helps too unless it's one of those odd days where a migraine looms. (Then all that light just hurts, but those are thankfully few and far between these days.) Upbeat music can help a too if the girls have finished their schoolwork.

New Year Frustration

So, I wrote about how I wanted to increase focus in 2016 at the first of the year. Here I am just three weeks later writing about my frustration in keeping that goal.

Okay, so it's not like I've given up. I haven't. I'm still trying, but the new schedule is proving harder to keep to than I'd like. When it's working, it runs like a dream. However, if you get even the slightest bit behind on one of the chores, everything starts falling apart.

This would be the schedule in question.

Of course, that may just be my personality. I enjoy schedules and routines, and I abhor when they get out of sync. It just ruins my day, and I feel like I'm playing catch up all day if not all week.

I had a few days last week where I was just exhausted after doing way too much the day before, and some of the housework piled up. Because of trying to get caught up on that, no writing at all was done last week aside from one lonely little blog post. But, we took advantage of the holiday Monday to get all caught up and reset ourselves. Here's hoping we can keep chugging along and being more productive in the weeks to come.

Homeschooling Chat: Cross Curricular Projects

Now that the girls are approaching ten and have the attention spans to match, we've decided to swap from doing a whole slew of small projects throughout the year to one big, cross curricular project. This isn't to say they won't still do some small, short single subject projects. They'll always have short essays, papers, and experiments going on. No, we're talking about a group of smaller projects grouped together covering a range of skills and subjects, all under the same theme.

Here's the girls' finished food pyramid poster.

We decided to start with one of the five basic needs as the basis of our first cross curricular project: food. No matter who you are, you have to eat. Shouldn't you know something about what you're putting in your body well before you're out of elementary school? We think so.

The Amazing Time We Live In

Nothing will make you feel old faster than sharing a childhood memory and have a teenager or child laugh thinking your joking because it seems impossible to them someone lived so long ago. Yet, considering how quickly technology has changed and is continuing to change, is it so surprising? Advancements that used to take decades or centuries are happening in just years, months, or even weeks these days as technologies compound exponentially.

Think about it. In your lifetime, what changes have you witnessed?

Starting Fresh with the New Year

Hello again. I hope you and yours had a merry holiday season and are having a happy new year thus far.

It's a time for new beginnings, and I thought I'd bring up a few of our fresh start goals for 2016. Some we technically started at the end of 2015, because why wait? Others we only started today, the first Monday of the year. Some may become new habits. Many are likely to morph or fall by the wayside. There's really no way to tell this early in the game, but still we try.

I have a horrible track record at keeping up with resolutions, so this year I'm trying picking a word keep at the forefront of my mind throughout the year. It's no secret I'm more than a bit scatterbrained, so I figure "focus" is a word I can use more of anytime. Therefore, it is my 2016 word of the year, and I intend to implement it in multiple areas of my life and the girls.

What is Productivity?

With the job search going poorly, Hubby and I have made the decision to switch focus to growing the store. We lost a lot of momentum when I went to work on site full time in late 2013, and it is going to take a lot of work to get back to the point we were at then and keep growing. Experience and research has taught us what needs to be done, but knowing what to do and remembering to do it when you're years out of practice are two different things.

That's why I spent almost the entire morning yesterday planning. I found several conventions in the area we've never attended and reached out to them about obtaining a table or booth. I set up reminders about our scheduled and tentative shows, days I need to start making, release, and remove seasonal and holiday items, sales dates, writing and editing deadlines, and any other task I must remember to complete by specific days for the next eighteen months.

End of Season Garden Recap

I've been fairly quiet this summer, and there are a couple of reasons for that. They also played a role in how our garden went this year, so I'll just get into that story.

We made root salad with the few radishes we got out of the garden. Mmmm...

We had a couple of really good weeks with the garden. Then Hubby and I both became horribly ill right as our late spring took a surprisingly wet turn. We'd picked solid bottomed pots because North Alabama summers tend to be hot and dry, so imagine our chagrin when this year turned out to be one of the wettest in recent memory. By the time we'd recovered enough to do anything meaningful with the garden three weeks later, half the garden had drowned. Our stakes and cages refused to stay upright, and we ended up fighting black spot and blossom end rot as a result.

Event Recap: Con Kasterborous 2015

This year's Con Kasterborous was this past weekend, and it was bigger than ever this year!

My Con Kasterborous setup for 2015.

July in Alabama is always hot, and this weekend was no exception. How all the cosplayers managed it in so many layers when outside the cooler confines of the hotel, I have no idea, but let me tell you, they were there and just as magnificent as always. Sadly, I'm kind of a chicken when it comes to asking folks for photos, and my camera gave up the ghost after overheating sometime last spring. So the only photo I have is the kinda sad set up shot above, which is the best my phone camera can muster.

Opening ceremonies was as fun and entertaining as ever. The guests were great this year and all seemed kind and charming. Unfortunately, thanks to it still being the middle of summer semester for Chris' students and his taking over the school's website and social media maintenance for the upcoming year, he was busy with grading and communicating with parents most of the weekend. So as much as both of us would have liked to take turns attending what we heard were wonderful panels, we really only got to see and hear as much as went on in the dealer's room.

We did get the chance to catch up with friends we haven't gotten to see in a long while and meet a bunch of new folks. We got a kick out of seeing all the beautiful cosplays as well as seeing Dalek Braun and R2-D2 rolling around the lobby.

There were a couple of disappointed mentions of lotions missing from our table this year. We've discontinued those and the guest sets from our usual line up. Unfortunately, the smallest possible batch of lotion makes four bottles, and the majority of the time only one or two would sell within the ten months before they became too close to their expiration dates to sell. If someone wants to order a minimum of two or three bottles, I can make a custom order for them, but otherwise the lotions just seem wasteful.

Also, discontinuing the lotions and guest sets has allowed us to keep more fragrances this year than we would have been able otherwise. My inventory closet is just a teeny tiny linen closet, so space is at a premium. The trim down freed up an entire shelf for new fragrances, meaning only one old scent had to be discontinued this year and room is still left for seasonal items and next year's line.

There is one thing I love about the new Westin location. The tables are large and sturdy, and the tablecloths provided are amazing. They don't slide around on the tables, and they provide enough friction to keep stuff from wobbling. We missed being as near the action as we were last year, but the new dealer's room was large enough that they could scoot the tables farther away from the wall than we've ever been able to before. Between that and having a parred down selection, it was a lot easier to manage the busiest times because Chris and I could slide by one another without tripping over chairs and open the cash box without knocking a shelf over.

All in all, Con Kasterborous 2015 was yet another good year, and we're looking forward to going back June 25 and 26 next year.

Long Term Plans... Well, Maybe Goals is More Accurate

Last week I told you about the patio garden we started after a couple of years slowly building up the supplies. It wasn't completely finished, but we made a decent start on it. It still isn't done, but we're a couple steps closer to finishing our establishing goal for this year.

Here's our patio garden as of Sunday morning.

We found some Italian oregano, lavender, more rosemary and basil, lemon balm, marigolds, alliums, and geraniums this past Saturday, and those got planted super early Sunday morning. Our seed packets arrived on Friday, but we're still working on digging out and edging the chamomile garden. I'm hoping I can get it done today, so the seeds can be scattered before rain blows in tomorrow and sets in for the next week.

Patio Vegetable Garden: Getting Started

We've been talking about starting a patio garden for two or three years. It's one of those things that can be a bit pricy to get going. So, we've been accumulating pots, tools, and bags of drainage rock here and there over the last few years. While irritating, it's been for the best since it gave the girls time to grow into being able to take active roles in tending the garden with us.

The girls learned how to transplant seedlings. They were so gentle with their beans!

Thus far, 2015 seems to be the year to get started as things finally fell into place with only bags of high quality potting soil and seedlings left to go. So with the girls' bean plants outgrowing our kitchen table, we devoted Friday afternoon and just about all day Saturday to setting up our first patio vegetable garden.

Random Thoughts from the First of the Year

2015 has been another year started miserably sick, so I've had a lot of time to think while waiting in doctor's offices and curled up in bed waiting on medicines to kick in. Mostly I just kind of stared at the wall and fantasied about installing release valves in my sinuses, but I also found myself musing on a few things.

Of course, a lot of thinking on the world the Icarus trilogy was done. I won't go into much of it here, but tidbits might end up being mentioned in the world building lessons coming up on the other blog. I'm not sure though as I haven't starting writing Monday's lesson just yet.