Cleolinda everywhere

Generally have tried to stay off the computer today. I was watching the Lost DVDs in my desk chair, so I could turn around and check my email if I heard a ding, but for the sake of my eye twitch, I'm trying to stick to TV, class reading, letter writing, cleaning--things that do not involve staring at a small, bright screen. For a few days, anyway.

My new journal! (Paper journal, I mean. It came in yesterday.)

Holocaust Survivor Simon Wiesenthal Dies.

A story that starts off with an almost noirish rhythm: "Business was bad. The city was hell. They got to talking. She had an apartment on Lee Circle but no food or water; he had those things in a ruined house over on the Esplanade..."

Elijah Wood addresses Dominic Monaghan's assertions they are deeply, gayly in love:  "Dom's actually going to have my child. We're very excited, very proud. We're going to name it Frodo. He wanted it to be called Mary [sic], but I thought since it was my sperm I get to choose."

The Lost commentaries: heh. "The Moth": "So... did you guys beat Hufflepuff, or...?" And I like how, in "Hearts and Minds" (don't worry, no spoilers), the writer-producers are all like, "And we thought it would be such a big, surprising twist" and the actors were like, "...Yeah. We totally saw it coming. We always thought it would happen."

anatsuno pointed out that Spreadshirt might actually be better for overseas buyers, particularly in terms of shipping, so I'll give that a go as well. I don't want it to turn out that we have "American versions" and "European versions," but with the different printing styles and fabrics available, it may end up that way. I have a feeling that it'll go easier if I let go of the idea of having exactly the same shirts in both stores, and just take advantage of the different things available.

Oh, by the way: exactly one month until the book comes out in Britain. I don't know about anything else, but when I know, I'll tell you. A fellow writer also suggested that I computer-print my bookplates rather than have someone else print them, so I'll probably set up a simple design and get some square-ish labels in bulk to print on. Even on draft quality the ink might end up costing a bit, but it's still less than y'all shipping books to me and me shipping them back.

(Yes, there will be a Lost recap tomorrow. Even if I'm not caught up with season one by then.)



   

New stores: I realized I should group things by subject (Lost recaps, Whatever in 15 Minutes) and then by themes within that (Sleeves, Lost countries, etc.). So we're going through a bit of reorganization. In case you're wondering, I'm trying not to actually say "Harry Potter" or "King Arthur" (although I guess the latter couldn't be trademarked or copyrighted per se), so the store titles will be a little... oblique. Thus, we have:

Ancient Kind-of-Roman Britain. Includes "Cup of Sex" mugs, plus "Stabnation" and "Sleeves" sub-stores. Yes, with "The Romans wouldn't let us have sleeves" on tanks and camis. Yes, in three different font styles. Also, there are buttons. Oh, just added: "omg so sexy."

[Famous Boy Wizard] in Fifteen Minutes. "Faster, Plebe!," "Outta My Way!," and "Werewolves!" Notice, also, the "Two-Faced Apparel" sub-stores in the first two sections. Basically, if you're into Slytherin, it's all about you.

The Mousepad Store. With new Cleo Sue mousepads. If you know of a way to let customers browse by item type--and I swear I saw somewhere that you could do this--let me know. Until then, I'll just have to put together item stores with dupes of the products--only buttons, only stickers, and so on--because I know a lot of y'all are interested in a single kind of product.

Speaking of Cleo Sue, the "Studious, Y'all" variant has been added. There aren't many products in that whole section as of yet, but I'm working on it. Oh, and I finally had the bright idea to actually quote the 15M line(s) in question on the section info for each store. Whee HTML!

Yes, I am working on Lost, and Lost countries, and Lost recaps.

Also, for those of you wondering how I've been able to do all this so quickly: I'm telling you, that's CafePress for you. At its easiest, it's "Start a new section, add all apparel to it, select one image to go on everything," voilà. The most time-consuming part of it is mocking a design up into the different dimensions--you can reuse the rectangular sticker template for t-shirts, I've discovered, if you just double the size of the open Photoshop document (that is, not a hard image--actually make it double the fonts, the backgrounds, etc.). But bumper stickers and round buttons and mugs all need their own variations. And if you didn't use a white background, you're going to need to do a fresh template for rectangular magnets and mousepads. Fnarr. But really, the only thing holding me up at all is just sitting here trying to think of designs--the two Plebe series took way longer to turn into something decent than they should have, but c'est la vie.

(Hee. While my mother was up here rambling on about some new distressing thing ["... and then we had to SEND the monitor BACK because we didn't order the one with the BUILT-IN SPEAKERS"], I dragged her over to the computer and showed her the stuff I'd been working on, because it has been kind of time-consuming, and I wanted her to know what I was, in fact, doing instead of cleaning. Now? My mom wants a "Cousins" mousepad.)

All right. I have a ton of linkspam I need to organize, Katrina and otherwise, but I gotta eat dinner, watch Rome, and load up the Lost DVDs. Although--I will say, if you want your name in a Lemony Snicket book, you better move fast.


   

God, I need to get the next Katrina entry finished up.

Anyhoo, I'm gonna go ahead and open up the Katrina store on the strict understanding that it is not finished and that new designs and products and things will be added, and on a daily basis if possible, so there will be more stuff. Eventually. But I have to read for class and I'm about a month behind on poem(s) for my writing group and I have Lost recaps to catch up on and it just takes time to change a design from one set of dimensions to another, you know? So the store's still rough, and not all the descriptions are finished, but, you know, pardon our progress and all that.

(Sorry, I'm a little frazzled today.)

Again: I am not keeping any of the profits. CafePress keeps the base price, and I have added $1 to that on every single product, which means that the number of products you buy affects how much goes to charity, not the total cost; it's a setup that encourages people to buy a lot of smaller items, basically, and while I'll put up anything anyone asks for, I'm definitely going to try to focus on buttons, magnets, mugs, that kind of thing, in addition to the ubiquitous t-shirt. Animal designs will benefit the Humane Society; all other proceeds will be split between Habitat for Humanity and Second Harvest.

I don't know if I'm working on a Lost recap or more designs tonight, but that's basically my plan for the evening. And maybe watching the Goblet of Fire trailer again.




   

I knew yesterday was going to be a bad day (well, let's say "an off day." Katrina is kind of making me reevaluate my concept of a "bad" day) when I woke up and my hair was completely flat. And I have curly hair, y'all. It was still curly, just... flat. Like it'd been pressed inside a book. Which was particularly annoying, since I had washed it and put in extra frizz-ease stuff the day before so that I wouldn't have to wash it yesterday, because I was going to be spending much of the afternoon at the library, and I didn't want to have to get up extra early and sit around waiting on my hair to dry, because I am a lazy cuss. See, it's at a length now where I'm starting to understand where that whole "I can't, I have to wash my hair" excuse came from. It's not as long as it was when I was in high school, for sure, but it's long enough to get supah-tangled and necessitate 45-minute showers with half a bottle of conditioner every two days. And then you don't want to immediately hit the hair dryer because your hair turns out all frizzofluff, you have to let it air-dry a while to get the curl to settle down, and how did this entire entry turn into the saga of my fucking hair? I do not know, people. I do not know.

So. Off day. I have a new purse. Black, genuine leather, $26, Target (insert hurricane guilt here. We're all probably going to have it for at least a month, so settle in and enjoy it, y'all). It's the first "grown-up purse" I've really ever had, although this does not mean that I am above toting my lavender straw clutch around. Point is, my previous purse was basically a stack of pockets and was annoying as fuck because I could never find anything. So I decide to get a shoulder bag, not very big, that you basically just zip open and stick your hand in. Also, my wallet actually fits in it, and nothing is sadder than a wallet that sticks a good two inches out of your purse. (Well, not nothing. Reminds me of a joke I heard: "What's worse than a worm in your apple?" "The Holocaust.")

Anyhoo, I'm feeling all sassy and capable with my new purse and I go to the library to get this forty-page article on tattooing and cannibalism and "Losing Face in Typee," and first of all, I proceed to make an idiot of myself at the reference desk by asking where the reserve desk is, and the guy says, very kindly, "The circulation desk is also the reserve desk." (Look, the school's online journal databases are so good that I rarely actually have to go to the library itself.) And then I go to the circulation desk and ask the guy there about the article, and he asks for the call number, so I give him my class's call number. And he's like, "No, the call number of THE BOOK." So I flee to one of the catalog computers and go look it up. But that's okay, because I've got the Purse of Sassy Capability! It's got change for the copy machine! It's got my student ID/copy card! It's got a notepad to write the call number down on! It's... nowhere in sight. I have literally had the purse out of the house for the first twenty minutes of its existence and I have lost it already.

I march back to the reservulation desk, give the circuvation guy the evil eye, and snatch my purse back off the counter.

And it just went on from there. I spent the day being so hapless that by the time I got home, I spent about an hour reading email and then I just crawled into bed. I didn't even have dinner until about 8:30. I don't know why I was so exhausted, except that maybe it's allergies. Everyone in my house is going around sneezing--me, my mother, the cat, all three dogs. And, I mean, Sam does sneeze to get attention sometimes. Like the time he saw me making a PB&J sandwich, and he knows that he gets pills in peanut butter when he's sick, so he starts coughing at me. I am not making this up. When he wants to go outside or play with you, if you don't immediately cooperate, he starts sneezing at you ("PSHT! PSHT! PSHHHT!"). This was not the sneeze of attentionwhoring. For one, he was out in the hall by himself and not dancing around on my face. Number two, he was sneezing so hard that I was afraid I was going to go out there and find a little explosion of pommy white fur ("PSHHHHHHHHHHFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFWWWWWWT!"). And then he came back into the room and started rubbing his eyes with his little paws, so I took him downstairs to get his medicine. Mom's sacked out on the couch with an herbal pillow on her face and the cat is on her back with one paw on her forehead ("What a world, what a worrrrrrld!"), and the entire household is basically sniffly and useless.

So I'm here now, dividing my time between sleeping, waking up after realizing I can't breathe, pretending to go through boxes of papers and magazines, and waiting for fucking Venus in Boston to come in. Please keep in mind that my vitriol is not actually directed at the book, which is a lovely piece of 19th-century sensation lit that I am extremely looking forward to. (The professor asked if we thought Typee, an early Melville effort, was great literature. Then he sort of quipped that none of us, most likely, would think that Venus in Boston is great literature. No, but if it's anything like George Lippard's Quaker City, it will be awesome literature, let me tell you what.) I ordered it from Amazon like two weeks ago, and they claim to have shipped it, and it is still! not! here! And I have to have the first part read by Monday afternoon ARGH.

(Okay, I just checked, and it's supposed to arrive on MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, YOU BASTARDS.)

And then there's the Katrina linkage project. It seems that friends are actually getting worried about me now, which is funny because most of the work is over now--between the links everyone's sending and that I'm seeing on all the sites and boards I visit anyway, it's mostly just pasting them into Semagic on WYSIWYG format and organizing them a little. So it's basically me bumming around with class reading and dog-feeding (fie on you, strict new diabetic feeding schedules!) and pretending to clean and listening to way too much Jewel ("My hands ARE my own!").

( Previews of designs on actual buttons, plus new Heroine Addict designs )

Okay. I'm closing the poll (so to speak; you can't actually close it) and making an executive decision, if y'all are amenable to it. Here's why:

1. You can't edit a poll once it's created, and I totally forgot to put Habitat for Humanity, one of the best and least problematic charities of all, on the list.

2. By the time CafePress sends me the quarterly earnings, the need for emergency donations will have passed, but there will still be need. This is actually great, because we'll be sending money when other people have stopped. But the focus will be on feeding and housing the survivors by that point, not rescuing them.

3. Several of the charities I chose turned out to be problematic. (See this comment, among several others on that entry.)

3b. Especially the Red Cross. It was suggested, and I think this is an excellent idea, that if you do want to give to the Red Cross, go down to your local chapter and donate. Give blood, also. It sounds like your donation has more chance of going where it needs to go if you give locally. That, and you can give now, which we can't with the CafePress funds. You can always give directly at the website if you disagree with me on this one, by the way.

So here's my idea: I'm liking the sound of Second Harvest and Habitat for Humanity, which will focus on feeding and housing survivors, which is what they'll be doing when the CafePress money becomes available. No one has come up with any problems these charities have, financial, ideological or otherwise, and some have even said, "I've worked with them, and they're good people."

In addition to that: at this time, the Humane Society is actually leading the poll, so clearly there's a lot more support behind that one than I anticipated. Why don't we donate all the proceeds from any design referencing an animal (polar bear, horsybird, comedy sheep--hell, even werewolves) to them?

So: discuss. We have plenty of time to make a decision, but I'd feel more comfortable putting up products on the CafePress store if I could say, "Proceeds are definitely going to these charities." Rather than, you know, "Uh... we'll give 'em to someone. Promise!"

( More designs )

Thoughts? See, this is why a Cafe Press store never got off the ground last year--how much do you add to the base price? Which quotes do people actually want? Who do we send the proceeds to--do we vote on a single charity or split the money up among, say, the four or five charities I listed in the previous entry? Will someone actually bitch about the idea in an "anonymous hate" meme again? (/slightly bitter)

If there's anything you would like to see--I'd be willing to use anything in the Lost recaps or the Fifteen Minutes, as long as the quote does not refer to something under trademark (Harry Potter character names are right out, for example). I see no reason why we couldn't use something like "OMGWTFPOLARBEAR!," however.