beetiger

Hey there! We're planning a trip to Austin during projectmothra's winter break this year, and *blush* I've totally forgotten which of you live there for the most part. So if you live in Austin and would want to hang out, drop me a line for early-planning purposes?

Thanks!

The One Card Draw from the Crowdsource Tarot is open from now until 2 pm. I'm using the physical deck. Ask for a card in the comments, whether I know you personally or not. Enjoy, an send your friends!

ETA 2:01 PM: Requests officially closed. Thank you all so much for joining me!

ETA2 2:19 PM: I drew one more card for all of us and got Paradox, upright. "The process of contemplating your problem may be more enlightening than actually seeking the answer." So thank you all for being part of the process, and I hope your contemplations are useful and bring you joy.

Reclaiming. Using the fireplace for the first time this season, and I'm pretty sure we never got to it last season. Color-flaming Duraflame in there, and big handfuls of fireplace incense on top of it to cover up the chemical smell a bit. I have no idea why we have a case of these in the laundry room, but we seem to. Random mellow bits of my music collection coming out of the Zune dock, laundry in the machine, webwork on the laptop on the couch and a novel that I've been meaning to read for forever.

We haven't actually used the downstairs den much in the last while. It kind of ended up as a dump space for a bit, and the lighting isn't quite right and it took a good bit of work to make it useable and clear the six spare cats worth of hair down here left form when my old cat took over the space entirely for the year or two before she passed away.

I can't justify pouring myself a glass of wine at 8:30 in the morning. Maybe hot chocolate in a bit.

But in the meantime, flickering flames. I used to watch the Yule Log broadcast on WPIX every year at Christmas, the whole thing, hours and hours. My family thought it was weird because, well, I was staring at a fire on a TV screen for 4 hours, listening to recorded Christmas carols, and well, we were Jewish. But I was kind of an obsessive kid, and well, there's something about a fire. The current setup of the den means that the fire is being reflected right in the center of the dark screen of the television down here, the one I don't think I've turned on in months.

Is it crazy that I'm feeling at home in my home for the first time in forever? I think maybe it's a good sign for a productive winter.

lediva and I went to see Bonerama, a New Orleans band with 3 trombones up front, at Sullivan Hall in the city on Friday night. Nicest crowd in a standing-only venue that I've been at in a very long time -- people pulled me up to the front because I was short, and my claustrophobia never kicked in because people were being really quite good at allowing personal space to each other. The band was selling their EP on a flash drive on a lanyard, which you could bring to additional shows and they would load more recordings of their live shows on it. lediva got her old mute signed. We got back to my place at 5 am.

Then I slept. A lot. lediva is a champion sleeper, but I usually can't manage to stay in bed much past 9 or so no matter how hard I try or how tired I am. I was shocked to wake up and see that my watch said 1:30. The rest of the family was at Furfright, but we just ate stuff and drank wine and went to the mall for a bit and played video games. I'm not sure if this was really needed or if I just kind of lost a day in there somewhere, but taking some downtime with lediva was probably a good thing. It's funny, when you have a long distance relationship and limited time together, and when you both like to be busy, it's tempting to just schedule and do a lot of stuff during visits. But sometimes it's really just nice and needed to be instead of to do, which doesn't always happen naturally in LDRs.

This week's got some webcoding I am kind of dreading and hopefully some oil blending on board. I got just enough beeswax out of my hive to make a few containers of solid perfume, and I've got a box of oils that I'd really like to spend some time going through. Some oils get better with time, and some...really don't. But I can't justify buying anything new right now.

I am not happy about the early snow. I went to check the beehive today, and the feeder was flowing faster than the bees wanted to go in there, so there was a pile of syrup-drowned bees inside. So sad.

It feels good to share a little of life here. I should remember to do that.

(Sorry to be so commerce-focused here lately. I'll get a personal post up again soon.)

I'm going to go ahead and place the order for the Crowdsource Tarot printing tonight, so if you were thinking of being part of it, please go ahead and send payment today. (Link below.)

We're not planning to print a lot of extra decks, so after today the price will go up to $18, and you'll probably have to pay the much higher shipping rate that Game Crafter charges for a single deck.

Thank you all for being part of this!

Crowdsource Tarot - Dead Tree Version

In order to make this work, give you the price we want on this, and get them in time to anyone else who does divination at Halloween, we're going to take paid preorders between now and October 9th. Each deck is $15 + $3 S/H within the US (If you are outside the US, drop me a line and we'll figure it out.) Please either click the button below, or send PayPal to sales@makeincense.com with the words “Crowdsource Tarot” in the title.

Anyone know/have a plausible theory on the origins of the phrase "dead dog party"?

I've just removed my wedding band (yay, Windex method!) due to worry that my finger would swell after a bee stung me right below the spot the ring hit my finger. I got the stinger out quickly and the bite seems to be a non-issue. But my finger's really deformed from compression under where the ring was, since I had those rings sized down after I lost a lot of weight in 2001, and have since gained all of that weight and then a bit back.

I don't expect to be losing that weight again any time soon, so I'm going to go ahead have the ring resized. Any advice on speeding my finger along toward recovery so that I can get a good measurement for the resizing (and also have a finger that looks okay)?

Those of you who have used a printing service (Cafe Press, Zazzle, etc.) for T-shirts: which service have you been most happy with, and had issues with?

Thanks.

I just canceled my credit card processing merchant account for Little Pagans and Mother's Hearth. I originally got a merchant account in the height of supporting the businesses, because I was losing a lot of business through the PayPal interface. People would place an order but not get as far as actually paying because they became frustrated with the checkout process.

But that was 5 years ago. Right now, I'm not doing the volume to justify the monthly fees and premium cart account costs. I'm also not doing very many live shows, during which the credit card processing's pretty necessary for larger purchases. So I'm going to go forward only with options that don't have any associated base costs, just costs associated with each sale, like PayPal or Google Checkout.

I'm still actively running both businesses and maintaining inventory, so feel free to keep purchasing stuff and sending your friends. Hell, feel free to send me so much business that I regret canceling the card processing.

This is kind of sad for me, the scaling back. Whenever things you've put a lot of energy into shrink instead of growing, it's sad. But this kind of gives me permission to put this further back on the mental shelf, for the moment.

I almost never win anything, but much to my surprise, I discovered that I'd won a blog contest that I don't even think I knew I entered. The prize was a catered dinner from Susie's Supper Club, a delivery service in Brooklyn that makes meals intended to be gourmet and appeal to both parents and their kids. They don't deliver to Westchester though, so I had to drive to their (not usually open to the public) kitchen in the industrial end of East Williamsburg. In the rain. And when I got in front of the place, I skidded into the curb and punctured my front tire. It wasn't a bad place to stop and wait for AAA, and the good part about being in East Williamsburg is that about every third storefront is a chop shop or used parts store, so it didn't take long to get a new tire. I got back home in time to meet Rhys' school bus, but barely.

We invited three families--friends of mine with kids about Rhys' age that he likes. The food was very good. There was an excellent mild chicken tikka with rice and baby carrots --real ones with a bit of the green on, not the drilled kind. There was a beef bourguignon made with cream instead of wine, with fettuccine and long thin haricots verts. And there was a totally serviceable if not stellar lasagna, with garlic bread made out of adorable mini baguettes and broccoli. All the vegetables were just barely cooked, with butter and salt and pepper, and were excellent even after reheating. Oh, and there were homemade chocoalte chip cookies and double fudge brownies. And because I am insane, and our CSA has pretty much been 75% tomatoes for weeks, I made a tomato, mozzarella, and basil salad too.

The adults were pretty impressed with the food. None of the kids ate much, so I really don't know if the food was not as kid friendly as claimed, or if the kids were just excited to have a big late night playdate with the adults not paying much attention to them and didn't want to interrupt it by eating. I think the latter, if only because I couldn't sell the chocolate chip cookies much more successfully than the chicken to them.

I hadn't really had a party, even a small one, in forever. And three families was just the right size for me in the house, even though we had a lot of extra food. I find it really stressful to set this kind of thing up, but I do enjoy it. I should remember to try more often.