Yule and Christmas have come and gone. We focused on the kids this year, but I still managed to acquire a small haul. Yes, Jarret did get his cell phone. The cheaper one he originally wanted. After a two hour meltdown which had to be redirected to his room several times, it appears he may be starting to understand that Mom is not the one he wants to piss off. He has accepted his fate with the phone, and Friday when he remembered the book report he blew off (a second time) was due, he had another meltdown at school which warranted a call home from the Principal. I’m sure he thinks I’m a bitch for telling my son I was going to take back his gifts if he wouldn’t behave and do his homework. Fuck him.

Ben is currently playing Guitar Hero 2 which he bought with some of the gift cards he acquired from friends and family. He also replaced his PS2 memory card that he broke.

I, too, received a few gift cards. Since I’m a Leslie Sansone fan I picked up a DVD set that’s supposedly exclusive to Target. It was only five dollars more than just the DVD alone, on her site, so I figured it was a deal. I’m a bit disappointed in it. It’s definitely inferior to her more recent videos, which would have each complete workout seperate. On this one she does the type of editing that requires programing the DVD player for each different workout. 🙁 Other than that it okay. I can use the other goodies that come with the set with some of the other videos I have of hers. I also picked up a datebook for myself. Technically it’s a diary but it has all the space I need each day to write down all the crap I need to do! I just finished writing iin all the astrological dates of the sabbats. No I have add my gardening schedule. Ben got me The Sims 2 Pets. I have to play with that some more before I decide whether I like it or not. Jarret got me a book of recipes for my bread machine. He loves it when I bake bread!

The best Christmas present? An email from Eric and Generic begging me to help them with the Light Brigade website. For those of you who don’t know last fall the corps began looking for my replacement as they seemed to be expecting more than what I could give them as webmaster. When The Twins offered to take the position the President gave me the impression of “don’t let the door hit you on the way out”, so I handed over everything I had to the boys and deleted it off my computer. A week later they emailed me to ask how to access the cpanel. Last week the drum major called and asked if I could walk them through managing the email addresses and the mailing list. Then there was yesterday’s email. These guys have no fucking clue how to run a website!!!! Bwahahahahahahaha!!

If you agree, feel free to join and post the code on your personal and/or business website, in your LJ profile, or anyplace else you can think of.

If you don’t agree, feel free to give me shit about it. 🙂

Doing website SEO is a bitch.

I spent five hours yesterday and six more today and I’m still not done. And that’s just the meta tags. Hopefully all this work will actually bring in more business.

Google pissed me off. Without warning they’ve changed the attributes for the Google Base feeds, so I have to redo my feed. Some of the attributes have been renamed, while others have been depreciated. “Category”, which stated under which category the item was in my store, was one of the latter. It has more or less been replaced by “Label” which requires I come up with up to ten keywords. It’s not too bad, as I’m already doing that. It’s just going to be a bitch cutting and pasting everything from the website to the feed. There are also a few new attributes that are considered mandatory. I don’t use any of them, but according to Google I have to leave a space for them, anyway. I should be thankful I received their email about all this as they sent it to my old email address. Why, I don’t know, because all of my contact info was updated as soon as I got the new address.

Took a bunch of photos of the jewelry I made for the craft fair only to discover the USB cord to connect the cammera to the computer is missing. Just my luck the Canon G2 predates the universal USB cord, so I had to cough up $22 to replace the fucker. Which is why I’m spending my time doing the SEO thing. If I don’t get the new cord by the time I’m done with that and the feed, I’ll dust off my Guerrilla Marketing book and develop some more unique ways to market the business.

Ah, the joys of being a proprietor.

Tonight is the craft fiar. I thought I had all my shit together, but then realized I need my tax certificate. Only, I can’t find my tax certificate. This is what happens when you run an online business. Papers that would noramlly be prominantly displayed are instead filed and forgotten. Luckily I was able to get a temporary. I will be ignoring the part where it says I can only collect tax from sales done at my business’ address. So that’s done.

Then I finish up making labels for all the jewelry. However, after I’m done I realize I never typed the words “two 8mm rhinestone encrusted, silver-plated beads”, which would be part of the description of the piece that I was going to donate to the silent auction. I have absolutely no idea where this piece is. I kept them all in the same bag. I only know that it’s been missing for at least a week because all this time I thought I only had 50 pieces. So now I have to find another piece to donate.

Oh, and drawing the Seven of Ghosts (Cups) this morning, so does not help.

I want to go back to bed now.