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Monday, May 24  

Via Italia

No time to write - we're off to Italy tomorrow for the Grand Tour. There will be no dispatches from the front, but you, imperiled reader(s), are perfectly accustomed to that and less from me. Ciao!

Friday, May 14  

As Soft As I Need To Get

It's occured to me that I've virtually stopped upgrading my software, both at work and home. OK, not everything - I still salivate at the thought of updated, more-standards-compliant browser releases and am in a protracted love affair with everything iTunes - but the major tools that I use regularly seem to be getting the job done without much left to ask for.

The latest and greatest Adobe marketing push barely even dents my attention shield, and it really doesn't help that they've joined this insane bandwagon of naming releases with meaningless alphabetic extensions like "CS" instead of just copping to the fact that it's freaking verison 8. (Note to product naming specialists: the Honda VX, DX, CX line pissed me off enough back in the day -- can't anything retain a meaningful title anymore? All I wanted to know was which one had air conditioning! I now find myself engaged in conversations along the lines of "Was DreamWeaver Ultradev before or after DreamWeaver MX?" - seriously. This is pitiful.)

Anyhow, I remember back to previous Photoshop upgrades, for example, and how much blather was lathered about something as useless as the Liquify tool... I have played with it for hours, but never once used it for anything. And take Microsoft Word (please! - har.): is there any earthly reason I'd want to load revision 17 with built in character sets for Brobdignagian dialects? There are so many menus and tools already that I actually get lost trying to change page margins.

Is this some historical threshold, that the primary tools needed by us analog entities for the routine stuff have gotten good enough and that's that? Or am I just bored with installs, a few new tweaks, and then the same ol crap? Or --OR!-- perhaps I'm just a backwards-looking middle-aged economy-stalling change-averse self-focused commie!

Thursday, May 13  

Sale Submersion

I've been underwater the past few weeks, and seem to have survived the St. Earth sale yet again. 8 times in a row, and we're starting to see patterns and benefit from experience, but it's just as exhausting to pull off each time. Somehow I ended up with about 200 pots, and a really nice group at that. Lots of brand new ones, as the inventory between sales shrinks every year... it's clear that I'm now a victim of my own success, and need to find more time or get a lot more efficient if I am to keep up and not kill myself in the process.

It's really interesting to see who comes, the mix of old and new customers, who buys what and in what combinations. Seems like each time there is a particular glaze that outsells the others, but it changes from one sale to the next. Same with forms - I finally make a lot of cups and pitchers and at the end of the day what do I have left? Of course - cups and pitchers! Brazenly unpredictable customer base, it is.

So now life goes into recovery mode: grocery store, laundry, time on the couch. Going to chiro in an attempt to mend a screwy shoulder and back, catching up on routine life maintenance, all that exciting stuff that became optional for a while there to meet the deadline. The greatest luxury is to go home in the afternoon and not have anything that MUST be done that night. Many things that want to be done, or that I feel guilt for not doing, etc., etc... but a luxury nonetheless. And soon, a trip to Italy.