Early morning snow

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Kitty visitors in the calm before the storm

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Updating systems

It’s been a light workweek here at Pax Industries, so I finally he some time to do some updates I’ve been wanting to get to for a while. Software was the big one.

I’ve been putting off upgrading to Mac OS X Lion because I first needed to come up with a replacement for Quicken, which has run my financial life for the last 15 years or so. I was never in love with Quicken, but it did what I needed it to do and I was used to it. There aren’t a lot of options out there in the Mac world; iBank is probably the best known, but one of the helpful trainers at the Apple Store gave me some pointers to some others, including Moneywell and SEE Finance.

In the end, I went with iBank, mainly because it has some history behind it and doesn’t appear to be likely to go away anytime soon. The import of my Quicken data went shockingly well. I was a little worried, having read a few reports of things getting hinky there, but my fears were allayed. I’ve been using it for a few days now, and I think it will be a fine replacement once I get used to its quirks. So far I’m finding it irritating that I can’t use the plus and minus keys to change the date and that opening an account doesn’t automatically open a new transaction. But I think it will be fine once I break some decade-plus-old habits. I’m also not excited about the cartoony interface with its ugly, oversized icons. Here’s hoping those will mature as the program matures.

With the path clear for Lion, I bit the bullet and started the download. It was taking a while — Apple’s servers have apparently taken a hit this week with all the iOS 5 upgrades — so I left it overnight and installed in the morning. I haven’t had any glitches thus far, just having to do a few tweaks. There are some new things here, but most of it seems to be hidden, so I have a book and hope to sneak into an Apple Store workshop tomorrow to see what’s what. In the meantime, programs are working as usual, so I was able to pick up quickly when a last-minute project came in just as I was finishing my upgrades.

Along with the software I put in place a couple of new procedures for handling email and projects, which I’ll talk about another time.

September

September has always been one of my favorite months. Generally beautiful weather, a great time to work in the garden, that delicious leftover beginning-of-the-school-year feeling (I was one of those nerds who l-o-v-e-d school and couldn’t wait for it to start — still am, in a way).

This September seems to have snuck up on me, though. I still love it, and I’m glad it’s here, but I don’t feel quite as mentally prepared for it as I usually am. It’s been a crazy, busy year — a crazy-busy year, really. By the end of June I had invoiced as many editing and proofreading projects as I had for the whole of 2010, and more of them were editing than the year before, too. I completed (with the help of my mom) a couple of big garden projects and put down fifty bags of mulch, although I didn’t get to everything I had hoped to tackle this summer. I’m glad that there will still be some time yet this fall to try to get a jump on at least one of those projects for next year. I spent some of my rare downtime this summer thinking about and putting into place some systems and doing some reorganizing to help me move more efficiently through my work and personal projects (thanks in part to Jennifer Hoffman of Inspired Home Office). I want to write about some of that, too, in case it can help someone else in my place.

So, hello, September. I’m glad you’re here.

vistor, redux

Our barred owl came back for another visit this past weekend, but he chose a sturdier tree this time. John went outside and stalked him with the camera.

visitor

The owls like me. I once had a screech owl in my house, and we’ve had a great horned owl in our woods for the last couple of years. This afternoon, this guy decided to come and pay us a visit, perching in the woods just on the other side of the patio, maybe 30 feet away from where we were sitting. He’s a barred owl. I’ve been hearing him for a few weeks now, but this is the first time I’ve seen him. He sat there for about 10 minutes, upsetting a robin who must have a nest nearby. He flew off soon after the robin dove-bombed his head.

Screw Factory Open Studios

I am honored to have been invited to be a guest artist by the lovely women of Dovecote during this Saturday’s Screw Factory Artists Spring Open Studio event. We’ll be there 1–7 p.m. — come and join the fun!

The Screw Factory is located at 13000 Athens Avenue in Lakewood, south of Madison and east of Bunts. Dovecote is on the third floor.

coming out of the cave

Over on the Girlfriendology group on LinkedIn, Donna of Pajama Paycheque shared a link to her post “Combating Loneliness When You Work from Home.” My response is a bit too long for a comment, so I decided to write about it here.

I have worked at home full time for a total of seven years. It can be somewhat isolating, and I do have times when I don’t leave the house for days at a stretch (especially when the weather is nasty — that’s one of the perks of working at home, actually). LIke Donna, I look for opportunties to get out among people during the week and find that just being near other people is enough to counteract the isolation of working solo.

This past year has been my busiest ever for both of my businesses, and it’s looking to maintain that trajectory for the next year. Here’s how I stay sane.

• I go to the rec center twice a week to do the weight machines and walk — a total of an hour each time. It’s not really a social thing for me, but it does get me out into the world, and because I usually go in the middle of the morning, I can reap the benefits of it being less crowded. I listen to This American Life podcasts or music on my iPod, and it’s a great time to let my mind quietly work on things in the background.

• I also attend a yoga class once a week. I’ve been going to this same class for almost three years now, as have a few others in the class, and we look forward to seeing each other and catching up on Fridays.

• In nice weather, I add a walk in the neighborhood on days I’m not going to the rec or to yoga, anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour, depending on how much I other stuff have going on. The weights/yoga/walking all help with keeping me in shape, too, since I work at a desk most of the time.

• I make a point to head out to a local coffee shop for a couple of hours at least once every other week. Most of my work requires too much concentration to work there regularly — some people can focus well with lots of background noise, but I’m not one of them. If I have a bunch of rote work on my project shelves, I’ll gather it up and head out. The coffee shop is also a great place to spend brainstorming and planning time — it can help to be outside of your normal environment to do these things.

• Probably the most important thing for avoiding isolation has been participating in e-mail discussion lists and forums. I have belonged to Copyediting-L, a discussion list for copyeditors and others in the publishing business, for seventeen years or so. My listmates are my colleagues, and the list is a fantastic resource for advice, reality checks, respectful discussion about points of grammar and style and just about every other topic under the sun, and even comic relief. I would be lost without this list; I learn something new from it every single day. I participate in several other lists and forums as well, across a variety of topics that interest me. As you can imagine, it can be quite easy sometimes to be drawn into a timesuck with such things, so I try to keep an eye on the time I spend on lists and forums and make sure it’s not getting in the way of getting things done.

• Twitter. Hallelujah! When it first came out, I didn’t quite get the appeal of Twitter, but once I got it — wow. I love this low-key way of staying in touch with friends, family, colleagues, and random strangers throughout the day. (To a lesser degree, this applies to Facebook, too. But it seems like Twitter comes with less drama.) TweetDeck keeps it manageable for me, and I don’t sweat it if I don’t read everything.

• I do my grocery shopping and other errands during the week when I need a break from work. This lets me take advantage of less busy times at the stores — it can take twice as long to shop on Saturday than on Tuesday — and also gets me out among people.

• I try to schedule one or two weekday afternoons off each month to go do something fun — a museum, the zoo, exporing a new neighborhood, a long lunch with a friend, stuff like that.

I’m lucky in that I don’t have a set schedule; I tend to work in chunks of time spread throughout the day and week, rather than sitting at my desk from 8 to noon and then 1 to 5. This flexibility was one of the most important driving factors in my decision to work at home, and it’s one of the things that allows me to do what I do to stay connected to the outside world.

What about you? How do you battle isolation?

Taking Risks

Part of running a business is taking risks and making calculated gambles. Once in a while, you get burned.

Late last May, I was contacted by Queen City Emporium in Springfield, Missouri, to see if I would like to consign my items in their shop. Consignment is when you place merchandise in a store and they pay you when it sells. Typically, the store keeps 30–40% of the sales price, and you receive the rest. Although many sellers will not consider such an arrangement, consignment can be a very good way to get your items out there without a lot of fuss, as the store absorbs the cost of promoting the merchandise and making the sale — no time spent marketing, going to shows, packing and mailing individual orders, etc., on the part of the seller. I have several consignment arrangements in place, and, until now, they have all worked very well for everyone involved.

I am especially cautious about consignment arrangements with shops that aren’t within easy driving distance of my home, so I took some time and did a little research. I Googled them and their shop and saw nothing that looked out of the ordinary. I checked Google Street View to be sure that the shop and the area were actually as described. I searched for websites of other sellers they had listed to see if anyone was complaining about them, and found nothing of the sort. The contract they sent seemed typical of other consignment contracts I’ve entered into. Not seeing any major red flags, I sent them twelve necklaces with a total retail value of $452 the first week of July.

Consignment contracts spell out reporting and payment schedules and details (e.g., previous month’s sales paid by check on the 10th of the month or some such), among other things, and when the sales reporting date had come & gone, I contacted them for information. I was told that they were a little behind in getting the reports out, but they were working on it, but never received the promised report. Then I got busy with other things and just let it slide. In October, I contacted them again and was given a similar story, with a similar result. Just before Christmas, I made a note to follow up after the holidays and ask for my items to be returned. I was preparing to do just that yesterday when a (now closed) forum thread in the Etsy forums caught my eye. (Head to the Etsy forums and do a title search on “Queen City Emporium” for a big eye opener, if you so desire.)

It seems that I am not the only one in this situation. As of this moment, there are known to be at least 35 sellers who have sent more than $25,000 in merchandise to Queen City Emporium and have not been able to get current, consistent sales reports or payments out of them. Several of the affected sellers are contacting others known to have merchandise on consignment there based on lists provided on the shop’s website and blog, but I would have never known there were others in this situation had I not accidentally stumbled on the forum thread, since I’m not listed as a vendor on their site.

I was fairly lucky in this situation. Because I had no history or in-person contact with Queen City Emporium, I sent only a dozen pieces, rather than the 20–30 I normally supply for consignment. Because I use a pricing formula that is made to accommodate wholesale and consignment, my materials cost is only a fraction of the retail value; those who price closer to materials cost are out a lot more than I am. Because I itemize, I can write off the materials cost — although not the lost time — as a loss on my taxes. And because I make sales through a number of venues (shows, Etsy, others shops and galleries), this loss is a smallish blip on my yearly sales.

Yesterday I filed a complaint with the Missouri attorney general’s office, as have many of the other known affected sellers. Today I am writing my merchandise return demand letter, although, based on others’ experiences, I am not confident that my merchandise will be returned in saleable condition, if at all. Today I am also putting into place some new policies and safeguards to limit my future exposure to this kind of scam.

Consignment will continue to be part of my business plan, but I am going to be focusing much more on wholesale arrangements, especially for out-of-area shops. A distant shop that wants me to consign is going to have to meet much more rigorous standards and pass a more thorough investigation before I’ll be willing to consider it, and if an arrangement is made, I will be limiting my exposure to loss until the relationship is well established. And, recognizing that I should have been following up on this situation more closely and more forcefully, I have made some adjustments to my procedures to ensure that missing sales reports and payments won’t be allowed to slide.

Obsession

I’ve spent the last couple of months experimenting with torch-fired enamels, and my enamel work is finally ready for prime time. I love the simplicity of the iridescent stamped copper cups along the bottom, but I’m beyond thrilled with the way the stacked pieces along the top came out.

These pieces will have their public debut tomorrow night at the Velvet Box open studio and trunk show (details in the sidebar).