Happy Birthday To T

Yes, our birthdays are so close together that we might as well just be one person. We do, actually, celebrate our birthdays together on one day. This year, we celebrated on Sunday. We went to Kabuto for hibachi (which I love… seriously. Dinner and a show. How can you go wrong with that?) and then we went home for presents.

No cake because—well, at least one of us doesn’t really need to eat any more cake. (It’s me.) Also, we are home so little since moving the store, it just seemed wasteful to get a cake that would sit around while we weren’t home.

Lots of great gifts from the kids. I wish I’d taken pictures of the fantastic wrapping job M did. Very creative and very pretty. And one of my gifts was in Batman wrapping, so how can you get any better? And R gifted us with a gift certificate for dinner and the offer to cover the shift so we could actually go out!

Sadly, I didn’t knit anything for T’s birthday, although I had plans to. I just had no time. At this point, I’m a little concerned about the Christmas Knitting.

I did get T this great T-shirt, though. Love!

Craft Fair Season!

Hooray! It’s craft fair season! I don’t know if this is the first one, but the first one of the season for me was today. M, R, B, and I all went down to the Johnson County Fairgrounds for the Extension Club’s craft fair. It was only one building, but it did serve the purpose of scratching my craft fair itch.

Plus, I got this great yarn. It’s called Claddaugh, by Good For Ewe Yarn. Very soft Peruvian wool and llama blend, with some Donegal tweed flecks. Love the color, too--a brickish color (Couldn't find a name on the label). And a very reasonable price.

And—good news—it’s a local yarn, produced right here in Indianapolis. (Well, I suppose the lambs and llamas produce the wool. But it’s dyed here, at least.) I will definitely be buying more of this.

I also bought a set of these Christmas Bells. They’re absolutely lovely. And I love thread crochet, especially for Christmas ornaments.And you know my motto is that you can never have enough Christmas ornaments. (Not really. My motto is actually, “If it doesn’t hurt, they won’t learn anything.” But that really has nothing to do with Christmas ornaments.)

Thread crochet—and I mean the kind that’s done on those teeny tiny little crochet hooks with the hook so small you could probably run your finger over the end and not even notice the difference in the texture of the steel—is one of those things I’d really like to learn. But it’s also one of those things that make me swear loudly and imaginatively.

At any rate, it was a pretty good trip for the first craft fair of the season. There are two more I really want to go to this season. I hope they are as good.

Happy Birthday To Me!

Another year above ground, my peeps. Yay me.

It’s been a year of changes for me. I left my real-world job back in March and went to work full time with our store. Now, when I say full time, what I really mean is almost all the time. Our business has grown so much over the last 4 years that we really needed more space.

So, after looking for the perfect spot for almost a year, we finally found it. We expanded our space, our product line, our display cases, our parking lot, and added a café. What fun!

What a lot of work.

What else is new for me? Not a whole lot. Still not enough time in the day to do what I need to do, let alone what I want to do.

Still searching for that zero-calorie chocolate chip cookie. Still trying to train my body not to sleep. Still crazy, after all these years.

Holy Crap, Am I Tired, Or What?

Some of you may know that T and I own a game store. And business is great. So great, in fact, that (as you might remember) I left my real-world job earlier this year to work full time with the store. I do marketing and event planning--and also work a few days a week in the store.

Well, we have been growing. And growing. And it was time to expand to an even larger space. So, after months of inspections and contractors and paperwork, we were finally able to move to our larger location. And it's big. We were large before, but now the place is ginormous.

And, I opened a cafe' within the store to serve our customers. It's a lot of fun, but right now, I am the only employee of the cafe'. So until I hire a part timer, I am in the store a lot more often.

We worked several overnights in a row for the move. I am not kidding. We worked two straight days, with only a break for showers and change of clothes. Then, we took a nap of less than an hour on the third day. On the fourth day, we went crazy and had 4 hours of sleep. It was getting pretty interesting.

But everything is back to normal. I am still in the store 7 days, but that will go back to 6 pretty soon.

Sorry to ignore you all for so long. I promise you, I will be back.