Ta ta 2007

I had a look at my 2007 New Year's resolutions to check whether I'm on track. Here they are:

I will pay off the new car through the sale of 46 million small shirts - not even close, in fact our bank balance would indicate we have bought another car (which we haven't).

I will send more cards (hot tip: people love cards) - IN THE MAIL.- ha! No. Not even one.

I will not make any major purchases. Well, maybe one art work, but that can be regarded as an investment in our future. - yes, we got an artwork (lets call it "retirement fund"). We also bought two computers and a shop (which is somewhat major)

I will not be so good at justifying every extravagant purchase. - um.

I will start cooking real food again. This means vegetables. Not til tomorrow though, thank god. - nup. Although I did once cook haloumi, and quite a lot of beetroot dip.

I will go to the movies at least once in the next year. - I don't think when I wrote this I meant Shrek 3, but for the sake of achieving something, lets say yes.

I will turn of Playhouse Disney by 9am. - victory! School is very good at forcing us to turn off the box earlier.

Resolutions for 2008 (utilising my favourite bullets).

• I will not be so busy.
• I will see more of my friends.
• I will walk the dog every day, come hell or high water (easy to say in the middle of summer, hard to do in the middle of winter).
• I will write a 50000 word "novel". Nobody will read it. Ever.
• I will make a neater pile of accounts.
• I will blog more.
• I will try and work out how to enjoy blogging and not worry about it making me appear unprofessional. Maybe I need another blog.
• I will earn some money, and pay off some mortgage, and then promptly use the money to
• Go overseas for a holiday.
• I will keep a clean house and a tidy garden.
• I will emulate Martha Stewart in every conceivable way. In fact, I will change my name to Martha Stewart, and then I will commit some fraud or insider trading and go inside for a rest, oh, wait...
• I will buy an excessive amount of new shoes on Ebay. My finely honed instincts tell me I am well on the way to achieving this goal.
  

The reason for the season is food

I've just read Make Tea's rundown of Christmas, and realised how much I like reading about what people have eaten. Here is our menu for the last couple of days:

Christmas day:

Breakfast: Sultana Bran. I can't get enough of Sultana Bran, I love it.

Morning tea: Last of the Christmas cake I made (which was very nice even though it was only made a week before), mince pies, cherries, bits of chocolate orange snaffled from the boys...

Lunch: Chook, lovely roasted free-range chick, Perla spuds (I boiled them and then mixed them with a little olive oil and chipotle sauce, bloody yum), various veges and salad. For pud we had a trifle I made. I thoroughly recommend the recipe, to which I added a fairly liberal dousing of limoncello, and we had strawberries and blueberries as well as raspberries. After all that we almost killed ourselves by gorging on beauuuutiful cheeses from the Kirkcaldies' cheese shop. We had a Roquefort and a gruyere and a goaty one, which was quite yum, even to me (I'm a non goat loving pleb).

Dinner: After swearing I wouldn't eat anything else, when dinner was pulled out at Glen's brother's house, I couldn't resist. They presented some amazing chooks, beetroot and feta salad and potato salad. It was delicious. And for pud there was a choc trifle which was amazing, and all homemade and amazing. Did I say amazing? And a beautiful boozy raisin and custard tart.

Of course we almost all exploded.

Today to counteract all the kai we went for a walk in the hills with dogs and friends. To counteract all the exercise we decided to scoff again... so at their house we had a delicious lunch of ham, homemade bread and salad, with assorted chutneys and dips, and in case you freak out about this health kick, we followed it with chocolates, liquorice, tiramisu, trifle...

And once again, I've almost exploded.

I hope your Christmas was as delicious. Why don't you all take this as a meme and write down what you ate? I tag you.

Fa la la la la la la la la

I feel GREAT. I am one day away from a holiday, which means no work. Yay! I'm happily ensconced in the shop, and I don't care whether it is busy or quiet. Busy will make the day go faster, but since it is like last day of school I can just mooch around eating all the Christmas themed chocolates.

Best part of all, I don't have to do any Christmas shopping. None. I have a shop full of gifts for everyone, and also full of gifts for myself. Glen and I are in lengthy discussions about Tivoli Songbook vs Model One vs Model Three.

I hope you all have a splendid Christmas planned. I can't wait, and will resume my drunken blogging FOR SURE over the silly season.

My head is full of shop (just for a change)

The shop is lovely and busy at the moment. People who come in have been really bloody awesome, and we think we're maybe onto something good.

Kazoos remain our number one seller. Or maybe I should say our number one SURPRISE seller, because I knew I loved kazoos, but hadn't reckoned on everyone else loving them too. We're onto our third shipment of them. Envirosax are coming in a close second. You'd better be in quick if you want one of our splendid Apple lamps



And we have more horse lamps arriving tomorrow.

Of course, I think you should all show your loved ones you really care, and buy them a Tivoli. Especially with all this shaky earth action, you need a cute rechargeable transistor.



End of shop obsessive post, which is really a true reflection of my crazy life at the moment. Hey, can you tell I've discovered the Flickr photo editing tool?

Have a nice drink all.

Media attention at last!

Apart from paid advertising, the Barris/Craig clan has been a bit quiet in the media, until today. Here is my boy playing the Wii. You know where you can buy the shirt he is wearing...

Thanks Harvestbird and Che for bringing it to my attention.

Oh dear

Check out how not to do retail (cheers Spareroom). Do check out the catering website, see if you can read it.

If I had a house, I'd let Hayley sell it.

Shout outs

Things that make me glad, like Pollyanna:

• The Dutch Shop. They make cheese delicious, and chocolate too, and biscuits... how is it that Dutch people are so tall and healthy and goodlooking with their insane diet?
• Shops that aren't in malls.
• Lindy-lou costing $6 something a bottle.
• No more wholesale orders.
• Daydreaming about which Tivoli to get.
• Glen not having to go to his other job for a month.
• Bullet points.
• Sounding really shallow in lists. The rest of the time I'm reading Joyce and listening to Rachmaninoff and shit like that.
  

I hope 23 is as cool as 22 was

Another year older, yada yada.

I was very lucky to get breakfast in bed this morning, and a great card, box of chocs and some garden thingies, um... fork and spade or mini shovel or something? I'm having a brain freeze.

I have some disgusting headwide infection, which has given me gross eyeballs and blocked sinuses. Wouldn't you know it, the one day I get spoiled for food, I can't taste it. This didn't hinder my enjoyment of a peachy day though. Any day beginning with croissants and raspberries and ending with homemade (bistro made?) icecream and the de-lovely Gusto is fine by me.


This is my brilliant present, which was cunningly won at auction by my parents, and then kept secret. I LOVE IT.

Undies and countdowns and other things

Yesterday Finn had a school trip to the pool. Glen packed his swimming bag up, and when Finn came home I couldn't understand why he had no undies on, nor what he meant when he said he had swum in his undies, nor did I necessarily want to understand what he meant when he said he had taken my undies. Sacre bleu! Glen had mistaken my lady pants for a tiny little pair of 5 year old's speedos. I am mortified in a way that can only be relieved by 6 weeks of school holidays, and I won't be setting foot in the school grounds for a LONG TIME.

On the shop front things are tres busy. We had our opening/christmas shindig a ling a lang long on Wednesday, and it was a sea of friendly faces, liquorice allsorts, mince pies and bubbly. In a strange way I think that even though the shop will be getting busier over the next 10 days or so, after Craft2.0 on Sunday things will get a lot easier for me. I've been flat out with wholesale orders, and the website has gone crazy baby. If I was into doing percentages and suchlike I'd say something about things being up about 4 squillionty zillion percent, but as it is I think I'll just say that we should be able to pay off the credit card this month. Woo!

It's all I've ever wanted too

http://xkcd.com/93/

I bags it

My boootiful bags arrived today. I want this one:
but I will make some kind of deal with myself, whereby I can't have it until I do something substantial, like say TURN THIRTY FIVE. I'm not very good about being secretive about my age, mainly because I'm so bloody surprised how young I am. Only 35! Well, only 35 in 5 days. I'm still 34 you see, which is like a newborn, really.

Hopefully the radios will arrive tomorrow. I'm not sure what something substantial I'll need to achieve before I treat myself to one of them, maybe something like survive the rest of the month without having a complete attack of exhaustion, or getting to the bottom of this small bottle of beer.

Happy happy joy joy

All my coveting beautiful things for years has reached a whole new happy place (I can't write proper though, too bloody busy to think).

Wanda Harland will soon (ie tomorrow or Wednesday) be stocking Saben bags and Tivoli radios. My fricking cup runneth over (and that cup is full of gin), I am that pleased.

Bags and radios

It probably comes as no surprise that I'm busy.  Bloody busy.  

I did get a night off on Thursday to go to the Wellingtonista Awards at Mighty Mighty.  It were grand, luvvy.  We shot into town and arrived in time for the quiz, hosted by Russell Brown.  I wasn't very good at paying attention, because there were all these people to chat to, and all this beer to consume.  Then there were the awards (and Unity beat my in the Best Shop category, not surprisingly), and then Blam Blam Blam played.  We had to leave shortly after they started, but my god, the rest of the Wellingtonista crew stayed out another 6 HOURS.  I can't even imagine (Jo has some super pics here).

Friday I felt a bit, you know, tired...  however, I still had a great day.  Fingers crossed I'll be able to announce another couple of great brands I'm very chuffed to be stocking in the next couple of days.  The shop has been really busy.  I wasn't expecting much til next Christmas, to be honest, but the word seems to be out, and I'm very happy indeed.  We put up some fancy schmants new shelves today and it is all ritzy and our beautiful books have a handsome home.

Today has been pretty peachy. I took my chiddlers to a cafe this morning and bought some plants and did some long overdue weeding.  Then a stint in the shop, and this evening a lovely birthday party at the neighbour scoffing paua and crayfish.  Now I'm on the couch doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.  In fact, possibly going to be asleep by 9pm.  Bliss.

Because I'm so freaking modern...

...my shop's opening party is on Facebook.  This means if you would like to come, you'll need to make me your friend so that I can invite you (that will confuse anyone unfamiliar with the complexities of Crackbook).  If you don't fancy that, flick me an email at sales@wandaharland.co.nz and I'll let you in on the details.

Objet d'art

Finally I have in my hot little hands a new MacBook. It is very foxy, and also a little mysterious, because I don't know what the rolly is going on with it.

It will transform the shop into an office, now that we'll be able to do website updates and all that palaver...

And it is so pretty, I'd like to pash it.

Golden

The weekend was hot, and good. It was Thorndon Fair yesterday. We arrived to find the smallest stall space you have ever seen. All the smart cookies had booked double spaces, but eek, that would be a hell of a financial outlay for one day. I was sharing a stall with Ms Katydid, who is the best card maker ever. We had a good time and sold lots, but I tells ya, when I got home I was a new kind of exhausted AND THERE WAS NO BEER. I had a cup of tea instead, but it didn't really do the trick. Which is fine. I was asleep by 8pm.

Now I am catching up with orders, and I've bathed the dog. In fact I've bathed the dog and I'm washing the Doggieboy. Hopefully this will stop our house smelling like dog for about 10 minutes. At the fair yesterday there were masses of people with teeny tiny dogs, and as I washed our hulking great Florence, I could see a great deal of benefit of having a dog that could be washed in the sink and transported in a handbag. Only thing is, they didn't really look real. And I'm not ready to be a cartoon, yet.