Week In Review
1.30.10 Intense week on all cylinders, as the weather turned from rain-chilly to arctic.
Productive work: Passions
On Saturday, Pat's marked up version of my "Grand Exits" arrived in the mail. Energy boost for the project! On Sunday I dug in. By Tuesday afternoon, I'd accomplished a solid revision of the first half. Now I'm stuck -- at a point where I have to do some serious thinking and new writing. Wrote a limerick.
Productive Work: Stewardship
Tuesday I got notice from Ebay of their change in fee structure. It threw me into a tailspin. It forced me to dig into my sales records, my inventories, etc. 450 items in my store but too much crap has been sitting on its virtual shelves for years accumulating monthly fees. Action required. My quick analysis and exploration of alternatives resulted in re-upping at Ebay. But I need to get off automatic pilot and reconfigure my store for faster sales at higher prices. In other words, quit worrying about finding a good home for a 1935 postcard and get some quality merch up there.
Exploratory Work
Exploring the possibility of using Paypal or Google Checkout for my own online store. This might be a great supplement to Ebay. Or it might be a grand distraction, since I love fiddling with websites and hate marketing.
Infrastructure work
Trying out some "cloud" backup strategies for all my valuable documents. Gave up on McAfee Online Storage -- weeks of dribbling uploading wound up with nothing being stored but the file structure and no reason for the problem. Carbonite (recommended by my new tech-god Leo Laporte) actually works, though I haven't tried the "restore" function yet.
Energizing Not-Work
My friend Nancy Stark is excited to see her one-act play Ping fully staged and recruited me to videotape it. We went to the theater Tuesday to scope it out, then Thursday I taped the opening performance. I finally got to use my roll of gaffer's tape -- I taped down my camera to the balcony ledge and let 'er rip. I love being a backstage insider... roar of the greasepaint, smell of the crowd.
Friday I whispered sweet incantations to my Adobe CS4 Master Collection software and actually produced a DVD without a hitch. Nancy came over for a screening and a glass of wine.
And Jim and I really enjoyed the play too.
Next week: Must combine some serious creative writing in the mornings with continued ebay attention in the PMs.