I ordered a bunch of promotional stuff the other day, with the business name of them, like door magnets & business cards. They’re really nice, on a dusty purple background with a sage green plant & cream lettering. I can’t wait until they get here! I ordered window decals for Dawn & Troy to put on their cars, too, but those haven’t finished printing yet and will still be awhile in getting here.

I’ve been thinking about having some custom rubber stamps made with the company logo on them, so I can just stamp the bag tags I made & add a label with the contents to it. I think that would really streamline things a lot, but I’ll have to see what my money situation is looking like after we get the taxes paid off before I make a decision of any type.

Dawn & I have started buying a few of the things we need to make spells kits with & have located sources for several other items. We’re both pretty excited about it this year, probably because it’s different or both of us & doesn’t involve sewing, at all. I do need to get Troy to look at my printer & see if he can figure out what’s wrong with it, I’m going to need it before too much longer & it’s nearly brand new.

I really need to stop putting stuff off & if I’m not going to make more books, then at least, I need to go to the home improvement store & look at the big sheets of wood & decide what I want to make my signs out of & see if my dad will cut it into pieces for me. It’s not like I’m doing things I don’t like to do or can’t figure out, I’m making books and signs, not reinventing the KVM switch after all.

I have been having a lot of problems sleeping lately, though. I’m sure that has something to do with me being in hibernation mode so much lately. I sleep on my side, but when I do, both of my hips go numb & then it feels like I’m itching under my skin, which really makes everything uncomfortable. It spread to the entire sides of my body last night, until I was sitting up on the bed crying & saying that I just want to sleep. I took some night-time cold medicine & then didn’t want to get up today. It took me a long time to actually wake up & feel like doing much of anything. I need to figure out what’s going on & fix it, so I can sleep. If I can’t sleep, I can’t get anything else done.

I’m thinking about getting door magnets for my car to advertise the booth and the website, but it’s proving a lot more difficult than I thought it would to find a suitable design. It’s not like we sell sports gifts or toys, after all. Those types of things are easy to depict with a picture, it’s not so easy to show that you sell metaphysical items and herbal decoctions, unless I can find a nice picture of lavendar or something.

—An hour or so later—

I think I’ve found something, it’s an herbal looking design on a purple background, so I went ahead & got door magnets, a window decal, our business cards fo the year, notepads & sticky notes that all match. For now, I think I’ve handled most of our advertising needs for the year, so I’m going to go find some scissors so I can shower & cut my hair.

I was hear all alone last night, since Troy was at work & Erin was out with friends. At around 10-11pm, I started hearing what sounded like something fairly large, crawling around under my trailer. Tiny didn’t freak out & start barking, but the cats could hear it, too & looked a little concerned.

I’m usually okay here alone & it takes a lot to scare me, but for some reason last night I let it get to me & was feeling very vulnerable & not very safe at all. I was on IM with my friend Mary, which helped quite a bit. The sound gradually moved to the front of my trailer, right under my living room window & it finally did get Tiny’s attention, although she wasn’t barking or anything.

After a few minutes the sounds ended completely, but it took awhile after that for me to calm down & start to feel safe again. It kind of aggravated me because I let it get to me & I usually don’t, and I knew it was nothing major, because Tiny would have gone nuts if it had been. I did start thinking maybe it was time to look into getting some sort of wireless security system installed here, at least for the time we live here. Erin will eventually move out & Troy will still have to work the graveyard shift two weeks a month. It would be nice to feel safe when he isn’t here & I’m alone.

I’ll see how I feel later on down the road, and if I’m getting that nervous every time he’s gone at night, it may be time to do something to make me feel more secure.

I went to court with Dawn (my business partner & best friend) this morning, and when we were finished & almost back into town, we decided that we were hungry & wanted to go to lunch. She had been awake all night at work, and had to go home, change clothes & come & get me, so not only was she hungry, but exhausted, too. We went to a local pizza parlor & had their lunch special, which was a half order of pasta (you choose the pasta, sauce & toppings), salad bar, a breadstick & a drink. The breadsticks are huge and swirled around a stick for baking, so one is plenty.

While we were eating, Dawn realized that it would be pointless to go home & nap, because she’d just have to get up & go to a parent-teacher conference in 2 hours, anyway, so we headed over to the health food store to check out their selection of bulk herbs & picks up some tahini. We found almost everything we need to put together the spell kits we want to sell, incense blends & everything else.

We stopped to look at the essential oils, which were a little more expensive than we wanted to do right now, but we got some good ideas. They have an amazing assortment of homeopathic remedies, but I didn’t anything like a diet pill or for weight loss. They did have stuff to help with nicotine cravings, mouth ulcers and motion sickness, which I thought was fairly cool.

Dawn ended up getting some quinoa, cherry toothpaste and tahini. She can’t handle anything mint flavored & every toothpaste in the grocery store has it in there somewhere, so she was hoping that the cherry would be better. She going to make hummus, which is why she needed tahini & we’re all trying to eat better these days.

Anyway, I need to go pick my niece up, since she’s bored & wanting to come over for awhile.

I finally bought the craft cutter I’ve been wanting for around a year & got started on bag tags & book labels to go in the books I made. The bag tags turned out really cute & will be perfect for the things we plan to sell this year. Dawn & I plan to head out to the health food store on Friday to check out their bulk herbs & essential oils, to see what we can buy & what we’ll need to grow. We plan to put together some really nice spell kits, herbs, ointments and stuff like that & I’m really excited about it.

I have no idea how well any of this is going to sell, but I think we’ll be happier in our own element & selling things that we’ve made ourselves like that. I’m sure it’ll go over better in the renaissance faire environment than baby bedding would, at any rate. I won’t try it at the apple fest this fall, since that attracts a different type of person.

We’ll still be accepting consignments from other people that we’re friends with, but we’re being a lot more picky about the quality of those items this year, and there are a few more rules than we had last time, since it felt kind of out of control & like we didn’t have enough information about their pricing and all of that. It made selling things to people who wanted a lower price really hard. Hopefully those issues are solved, or will at least be better than last year.