What A Week!

Howdy!
Yes, I know, it's been a while!

Heather and Cici! You won the contest and I need your contact info to send your prizes!

So, what have I been doing for this past week? StitchCraft was participating in the Pleasant Home Holiday Shop for the week. Pleasant Home is a beautiful mansion and for the first week in December, it is turned into a holiday shop with handmade crafts and art from local artisans.

We've had the pleasure and honor of being there for three years and ever since we've been there we've been the top sellers and I think we've probably had that distinction again and keeping that record holds special meaning for me because this is the first year the group isn't with the church. (They had their own space in the shop far away from ours.)

I was worried there wouldn't be enough merchandise to sell so I was furiously knitting up a storm and I ended up with about 100 pieces. I needn't have worried because five others contributed items and we had nearly 200 items to sell.

Everyone had at least one sale - Marion did really, really well with her jewelry and knitted goods. Overall, we made more than we made last year - which was another personal point of success for me.

Melissa took some photos and I'll let you know when she posts them. But our tablescape was really nice. Melissa did the original setup and Marion did some tweaking. We had a great variety.

My task from Mr. Honey was to come home with less than I left with. I left with four big bags and a box. I came home with three bags. I sold a little over 20 things. My goal was 30 but I can live with it since, well, I have to and because I sold an afghan for over $100!! (it was a great week for me on that front as well.)

I saw a couple of folks who have shops on etsy and still haven't managed to make my top ten list (that will return next week, btw!) and I got some ideas from some of the crafters that I will have to make reality.

So, today, I'm a bit tired and I have a meeting at church. I am going to take the rest of the day off and then come back strong tomorrow. I hope you had a great week last week and a great week this week. I cannot tell you how great positive reinforcement is for the soul.

Make it a great day!

We Are Stardust

and we've gotten ourselves back to the garden!

Thursday is date night for me and Mr. Honey and right before we left, At&T called to say they were stopping by to check out the problem with the DSL service. I had called Earthlink and asked them to connect me with someone who was stateside, not because I didn't want to speak with anyone in Asia, but because they only could do so much and I needed to escalate the problem. The operator connected me to executive services and a man named Blake.

Blake promised to send the situation to his crackpot team of technicians. That was on Monday. On Tuesday, I got a call from Tim. We went through everything and he determined the problem was with AT&T (which we already knew) so he contacted them and today, right before we left for dinner (because the window for arrival was between 8am and 8pm) a nice man named Jose called to say he was coming out.

Jose came out and said he had other Earthlink customers who were having the same problem because Earthlink migrated their usage contract from one carrier to another and a boat load of Earthlink customers got dropped. The solution, he said, was to have the central office reassign the port the dsl service came through so it would feed through to my house.

Simple enough. Except it was after five and no one in the central office works after 4:30 and it's about a five hour fix. I got Tim on the phone and he and Tim talked and as Jose was leaving, he saw another AT&T truck with another customer. So they talked as well. Tim told me he was going to check to see how ports were to be changed and if the central office had to do it. They all said tomorrow. Tomorrow should see the end of my torment..

At this point, what was another day? So, Mr. Honey took me out to dinner at a place we hadn't been to in a long time. We had a nice dinner and I came back home, did some knitting, watched two episodes of The Nanny and came upstairs to the office just to stroke the modem and remind it that it wasn't its fault.

I have dsl service! Some little fairy must have stayed at the central office or Tim twisted someone's arms because I am back and up and running! Life has returned to something looking like normal.

My great thanks to Blake for getting involved and to Tim for working diligently on this for the past three days. They did in three days what the rest couldn't manage in the previous ten. When you have an Internet based business, you kinda need the Internet to do your thing. I was thinking of places to take my laptop that had free wi-fi so I could work. Now, I can work in my own home. And the router is up and running as well so I should be able to work downstairs when I have to. I appreciate the work they did to get me up and running. I appreciate how they kept me in the loop and talked me through what was going on. It did a great deal to keep me calm and patient.

It's a restoration of faith. That's what it is. And I am grateful.

The Special Olympic Scarf - Completed

So, the yarn arrived on December 4 and I started working on it that evening after we came from dinner. I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning - watching something on the t and v and crocheting the scarf. I didn't finish it before falling asleep so I got up and got to it right after reading my bible passage and taking care of some other business.

So here it is. And it is going to make it's way to the Special Olympics this very day. I decided to do some Fibannoci striping and some fringe. I think this is a very nice idea someone had to do these scarves for the athletes and others on the Special Olympic team. It speaks to being an individual and a part of a team. And there are folks on Ravelry who have made 6 or more! WOW!!

I don't know if they have the opening ceremonies televised or not, but if I had known this project existed during the Olympics - this would have been my Ravelympic project. As it is, I'm really honored to be able to contribute.