January 19th, 2012 
Kelly Sorry I’ve been absent lately. We are starting to get our lives back to “normal” after the craze of the holidays. So what has our 2012 been like so far?
Cats: Specifically Sam. $600 in vet bills later and nothing has really changed. He goes back to the vet next week to have blood work done again to see if his white blood cell count is back down to normal. For now, he’s still not using the litter box as he should, but he stopped peeing on the couch (big plus) and he’s still his normally bitchy self. We’ll see what the vet says next week.
Medical: I’ve had 2 doctor’s appointments myself this past week. I have finally established with a new doc up here and had blood work done. I’ve been off of my thyroid meds for a few months now and while it really messed me up now my body doesn’t seem to need it. My levels are on the border of normal and so they don’t think I need to medicate it. I still have a severe iron deficiency and so I’ll continue to be on iron pills. I also have some girlie issues that will hinder me getting pregnant (which we want to do shortly) and so for now I’m on some progesterone pills to even that out and fingers crossed nothing additional is wrong that will cause more visits.
Magnets: I’m happy to say that orders are much calmer now but we’re still seeing sales every day and a little stream of orders is better than nothing. It’s a nice change to have some additional income coming in but not have to work ourselves into the ground. We’re at the brink of having a whole new method for creating them which I’m very excited about. Will cut almost all of our production time in creating and we’ve also found a new distributor to cut our costs. Definitely excited about that. And we created a romance set for Valentine’s Day. No bites yet but I wanted to make sure we got it done and crossed off our list.
Scott’s Art: I’m ecstatic to say that Scott’s art shop is booming! While January is notoriously horrible for Etsy sales, he has had the highest grossing month ever (holiday months not included) and we still have over a week left. It seems some of his newer pieces that took so much time are really paying off. He’s also working on a couple custom items for a customer which will be amazing. He’s also on the brink of launching another art shop full of cool new styles, I can’t wait to show it off for him! I need to take some product photos for him today and we’re hoping he can get that shop up in the next week or so.
Flowers: I’ve had my flower shop closed for a few months now. I’m excited to say that it won’t be for much longer. I’ve been testing some new techniques to have similar flowers to what I had at a MUCH lower production rate. I just couldn’t justify the time they were taking me and so I’ve found a way to slice down the time and have a product that is almost the same as I had before. I’ll keep you posted as I get some items completed. And I’ll need to reassemble my light box to be able to take photos again, ugh.
Overall businesses: Yesterday we decided to make ourselves a schedule. There are not enough hours in the day for all we want to do and trying to work full time, run all of these businesses, relax a bit plus get all our personal creativity ventures done is proving to be very difficult. We’re going to try out this new schedule that helps us focus on one area a day so we don’t feel like we need to split ourselves 7 ways at a time and allows us time for personal projects like scrapbooking, photography, Scott’s book, etc and time off to veg out in front of the TV or go adventuring around Oregon. We’ll see how it goes. 
Winter: I’m done with winter. The first few weeks of cooler temps and rain was nice. But now that we’re knee deep into the rainy season, I’m ready for summer. It’s cold it’s wet and it’s old. I was like a kid on Christmas this past weekend however when we had our first snowfall. Growing up in Chicago snow is no big deal and it’s irritating while trying to get to work. But when you haven’t seen it in years and you don’t have to commute anywhere, it’s beautiful!! It snowed on and off for a few days over the weekend, no more than an inch but it brought a smile to my face (and the kitten sat on my desk and meowed at the snow while I worked). We were supposed to get 4-6″ yesterday but the temps were higher than they expected and instead we got rain. And now it is rain rain rain all day every day.
House hunting: Our home buyers seminar was postponed this week due to weather (which there didn’t end up being any of but whatever) and so we have it next week. I’m excited to learn all we need to know about buying a house which is a main goal for us this year. We also spent time wandering on the WA side of the river last weekend and found a great little town that is our new fav. Camas is about 20 minutes East of Vancouver, totally commutable to get to more civilization, but is a smaller town on the Columbia with trees and hills and lakes and is just what we’re looking for. We drove around the area a lot and have been looking at houses we like. Excited at the prospects of narrowing our search and lining up more ducks on the home buying front.
That’s it for now! Hope everyone is doing well. I need to make myself a schedule to get back to posting more often but happy that I’ve at least caught you up on life in Portland.
