I apologize for the flurry of posts followed by silence. I’ve been chugging away at work and juggling family stuff (Katherine’s eighth birthday is this week which means cakes, parties and dragons, oh my!) and trying to make it all fit together in-between seemingly endless amounts of snow. You wouldn’t think that snow could have much of an impact on a blog, would you? Still, I’ve had a few snow days recently, today being one of them, in which either Katherine or John or both of them try to be HERE.

HERE is how I think of the combination of space and time that form my creative continuum. HERE is me in my studio with my thoughts and my head-space and my idiosyncratic little rituals that get me into the groove of making and creating. In the HERE, there is no room for other people, there is no space for ringing phones (I shut off ringers), there is no self-doubt or external pressure.  In the HERE, I am alone with my ideas and they can develop at their own pace.

Snow days mess things up royally. I am not happy with plunking a child in front of the TV for the day and I fully recognize that there are limits to even the most creative and self-directed child’s ability to manage her time and find meaningful things to do. So basically, I become a shuttlecock again, bashed between household chores, child-wrangling and attempting to get a small amount of something done. I used to be much better at this, but since K’s been in school for full days, I have become more reliant on those regular six hours without her. Don’t get me wrong, I like her, love her and enjoy time with her, but adding her to my day shifts the balance entirely.

Recognizing that my focus may be interrupted at seemingly random intervals throughout the day, I’m going to try to get my Etsy shop up and running. It’s currently a shell without product posted for sale, which is why I didn’t give you a link to it. As soon as it’s ready to my satisfaction, I’ll be posting!!

Getting a website or on-line shop ready is the kind of project that is best accomplished in smaller chunks, with a detailed list of tasks and changes, with pause for reflection on how the presentation looks and to review in case any important details were missed. If you spend hours at it without stepping back and seeing the overall effect, your vision can become skewed and you start to miss glaring errors.

I have pieces of text to prepare that can be pasted as needed into descriptions, a few photos to retake and some weighing and organizing to do. The thing I’m most struggling with is postage. Canada Post is an expensive postal system by comparison with USPS and I’m working on figuring the balance between staying competitive and not taking a hit on postage. I suspect that trial and error will win out in this case, despite my best attempts at calculations and whatnot.