electric boogaloo

Yikes, I leave for a couple of weeks and come back to a comments section full of jumbled up spam. Sorry about that. And if my spam catcher is eating real comments again, please let me know. I have it set to KILL for now.

This week I’m doing a some guest posting over at the very lovely http://littleladieswholunch.com/post/15457448012/crunchy-guest-post Little Ladies Who Lunch blog.

How I got mixed up in a healthy home made food operation would be a horrifying mystery to the me from the 1990s, but here we are.

Meanwhile, we are working like dogs to get all of our new products put together for this year. We want to do more jewelry items, more cool baby stuff, more more more. We have so many ideas that may or may not actually be good products. A couple of weeks ago I was in OMG Let’s Just Have Everything Made in MFing China meltdown crisis mode. It was awful, born out of total frustration from trying to get what we want produced here.

It’s not a matter of going overseas to make a little more money on a product — it’s a matter of not being able to find USA manufacturers at all. It’s a matter of asking customers to pay $25 for a small plush rattle that’s on the shelf next to dozens of $8 rattles. A lot of times it means a choice between going overseas or just scrapping this or that product altogether. Which is fine except that it’s so cuuuuute and I want to produce all of the adorable nerdy things. But “I wannnaaaa” is not really worth compromising over, is it? No, not yet. There has to be a solution and this is what I spend my late nights doing instead of writing and updating my blog; I am working on all of the designs and searching for creative ways to use local resources to produce everything for a cost that American consumers will pay.

It’s exhausting being this neurotic, let me tell you. But! I think we’re figuring it out. Little by little by little… slowly slowly slowly the little train climbed the mountain…

Must type quickly — everyone is sleeping late except me and very soon something will burst and the day will start. Either my bladder, forcing me out of bed, or my kids will burst into the room demanding to be fed for the tenth time this week which sounds reasonable until you remember that it’s only Tuesday. Morning. Even the dog is letting me stay in bed a little longer, and oh oh I should be using this peaceful moment to sleep but oh blog, I miss you, blog!

So many half-written posts are in my drafts folder from the last month, but I fell asleep while writing them. I just looked through them and one ends with the auto-saved sentence “My roommates knew that I was not the type of per on to let eonferfiln food go to eastel. ”

That’s true, I don’t let eonferfiln food go to eastel. Because I’m not even Swedish!

Clearly I was typing in those last minutes of the day, the minutes when nobody is asking me to do anything or telling me about the map they just drew or the game they invented and nobody expects me to do any work or pack any orders or feed them or do anything. Except for my own stomach and brain which use those quiet moments to remind me that they, too, would like to be fed.
(children whomp into the room, mutter something about bad dream, dive onto my stomach, dog gets excited because oh wow! It’s you guys! And the day started and didn’t stop until just now. Thursday at midnight.)

So hi! How was your December?

Ours was absolutely ridiculously avalanche busy. Exciting! Hectic! Unreal.

At one point I thought oh man, this is so much, the day seems so unbalanced, I must be really even more horribly disorganized than I thought. Which was upsetting because I’d worked on organizing things somewhat and streamlining shipping etc. My exhausted, hormonal lady brain was quick to point out that SEE this is exactly why you are a ridiculous human being who sucks. But last night I added everything up and holy night you guys, this December we TRIPLED our sales from last year’s holiday season. Well! If we had sold this much last year, I would have died because back then, oh I was so very young and I didn’t know the world of thermal printing and bulk mail drop off like I do now. I didn’t know about automated emails and tracking numbers. I was hand writing every address with my hand! And then I was loading everything into IKEA bags, standing in line at the post office and paying those nice people to weigh and stamp every single package. With their hands.

Nowadays we copy and paste the address into a thing, enter the weight, click click click dang old bzzzzzpop! That’s the adorable little thermal printer. Then ping! My shipping robot sends a friendly email telling people what the thermal printer just did. Then pack pack pack, into the USPS bin, which can be handed to the post man or dropped off at the post office loading dock.

So yeah. Yay! Wow. Many many many things to report, discuss, write, think, talk about here. But right now? Right now I’m going to drink some water and go to bed. I suggest you do the same. Sakes alive, boy, Christmas is coming! We’ve got to get ready!

I’m trying my very best to become a more grownuppish company. After doing a lot of research/ watching Shark Tank on Hulu while I rode my exercise bike, I decided that it was time to:
* Research licensing. Doesn’t that sound impressively corporate?
* Push to finish the new products that have been in development for more than a year now. Just solve the silly problems already and be done!
* Maybe set up a more sophisticated accounting system than the one I do in Excel. Not saying that YOU aren’t sophisticated if you use Excel for tracking expenses and income; for a lot of people, Excel-based book keeping is probably perfect. But my Excel skills equip me to use it as nothing more than graph paper. I know how to set a print area because one day I finally called my friend Nina almost in tears saying for dear lovely Christ, why won’t it print??, and I know how to make different workbooks because she happened to mention it in that conversation and that’s about it. So after a few years of being in business, I reached the limits of graph paper and began researching accounting software for small businesses. Nobody can drag out comparison shopping like this lady right here, but after carefully weighing all of the options for months and months I panicked one night and bought QuickBooks.

Holy shit.

It’s just software, right? I know how to read and how to balance a checkbook. I would simply walk through the setup steps and learn as I went. I proudly told our accountant, “So we have Quickbooks now, so you know, i guess we’re pretty impressive with how mature we are, even though it is so intimidating that we havent installed it but STILL.” He was excited for us and said not to worry, it is very easy to use but now that I think about with hindsight and all, our accountant thinks a lot of things are exciting and easy and wonderful that we think are boring and difficult and horrible and that’s the whole entire reason why we pay him to do those things for us. So when he said “Quickbooks will be easy!” I should have immediately returned it and used the money to pay an out of work college student to follow me around recording expenses and income. But no, no I think I am so clever. Quickbooks! I can do this!

I installed it and launched the super easy quick setup wizard. Perfect! You already know what this next stuff is going to say, right? It kicked my bottom. I had to stop every few minutes to look up the words they were saying to me. A lot of times I just made my best guess. I was going along alright until I got to the question: START DATE.

Start date? Today, right now? No, not right now! There are outstanding balances and whatnot. A month ago, a year ago? What do they MEEEEeeeeean asking for a start date? And why is there a warning saying that this is very hard to change later if you do not choose well. The wise Google chorus agreed that a start day of today would be easiest, but for some reason that felt weird so I split the difference by closing the software and not looking at the set up wizard for two months.

When I finally came back to it, oh right. Start date. Sheepishly clicked “today” and went on. Back to looking up every new term, and many old terms that don’t mean the same thing in accounting as they mean everywhere else. Words like ACCOUNTS. and BALANCE. And OH MY GOD why am I making you read all about this when my own brain defends itself against learning Quickbooks by going to sleep? Every time I launched the little cute Quickbooks icon, it was a race against time because no matter what time of day or night, no matter what kind of lighting or sound or chaos there was in the room, in ten minutes I would be asleep. Big Pharma would lose a lot of Ambien sales if people knew how well this worked.

But in those tiny little windows of awake setting-up time, I think I might’ve gotten it mostly pretty well set up. There are still things that make me run to the Facebook thingy and beg strangers and loved ones for help… For the love of poop, tell me how to make it print! How do I add shipping to an invoice? When I make an invoice or a packing slip from a customer job, why do I have to re-enter all of the items and quantities even though doing so leaves room for errors and makes me want to give up and go buy an above-ground pool full of giant gymnastics foam blocks and list it as a business expense?

But we all have to start somewhere, right? I got the For Dummies book, and I’m using Google as my Quickbook for Dummies for No-seriously, DUMMIES guide, and in a couple of months I hope to sit down with our accountant and show him our beautiful books and he will say well done! This all looks perfect! Clearly it was put together by someone who is not an idiot! Didnt i say it was easy?? And I will laugh because ohhhh you! And then I will run at him with a sharp pen like I’m going to kill him with it!

But then I won’t kill him because we love him and we are so deeply grateful for whatever is wrong with some people’s brains that makes them love accounting. For that I am thankful, amen.

1. I propose that we change the name of this tool:

to Spatula.

And this tool:

we change to Batter Scraper.

And this tool:

and this one

shall be called Mr.Scoopy.

And these:

will be called Science Slurpee Straws

And these:

Will be called What Am I even Cooking Here? Fish? Is it fish? Let’s call this a Fish Turner.

2. I further propose that we change the name of Daylight Savings Time to something that will help people remember which way it goes. Like Moresleep’s Eve or something in the fall, and it could be a holiday which features drinking wine and being hungover. Then in the spring we could have something like Jumping Day. These will be fun holidays with little cakes and things, and they will be connected to the season rather than to each other.

3. For people with combo-type IBS, let’s make a pill that is half laxative and half immodium. I’m hoping that Stop-n-Go will license their logo to us. My backup name is Stopalax. Or Go-dium.

Similarly, I want a pill that’s half Ambien and half Provigil. It will make you stay awake for 24 hours, and that whole time you will be talking dreamstate nonsense. I’m trying to decide whether these should be packaged like the dual-flavor packs of Nerds, or if it should be half and half, OR smashed all together like shampoo+conditioner.

4. All parents who are frustrated by the way that high-stakes testing has hijacked education? Shall encourage their children to mark the letter C for every single answer to every question. This act of civil disobedience aims to shift the conversation back to what matters. How do we want to educate our kids? What’s the goal here? And how is handcuffing our best teachers to a test helping us reach that goal?

5. Further to this proposal, I humbly suggest that Jeggings be banned from this earth forever, not because I care about anyone else’s style choices but because they are that uncomfortable.