Fall has fallen

It is officially fall; the time has changed, the leaves are falling, and most of the fields around us have been harvested. 

We have several home improvement projects to work on, like finishing the painting in the sunroom, kitchen, and back office, changing multiple light fixtures, and replacing the deck, all of which is part of my original plan when we bought the house.  

Seriously, in just 4 months we have improved, upgraded, and restored many things, by the time I'm finished my realtor won't recognize the place. I can't wait until next spring when it's fully finished to show it to him, I think he'll be impressed, at least I hope he will since I'll be asking him to help us rent it out.  

Oh, didn't I mention husband is changing jobs again, so next year we'll be moving again, which plays into my decision to downsize my business, I'm basically cutting off etsy. I have deleted 235 historic listings, I am letting all my active listings expire next month and I have no plans to renew. I will keep the shop front as a point of contact and digital footprint and may do "custom" made to order request sales, but otherwise I'm done with etsy.  Their crap-tastic ai changes are finally too much, and I've come to realize that they always do this sh*t going into a holiday season, slow rollout, ill defined, no compliance date, busywork when we have better things to do than change out photos just so they can steal the images to train their stupid ai. 

They manipulate people into doing things they do not want to do, by rolling things out right before the holiday season, they know that many makers have had slow sales, they know we are all looking forward to and hoping for holiday sales, so the urge to comply because you "might miss out on sales" this season, is just a bit too do as I say or else for my liking. They do this almost every year, new payment systems, the odr crap, seriously I've had my shop 11 years and this is like the 6th or 7th time they have pulled this launch something shitty for the holidays shtick. I'm over it.

So, cutting off etsy and reducing business and social media activity will allow me to focus on finishing the house and enjoying my holidays with my husband. 😇 We actually started yesterday, I cooked the first turkey and practice thanksgiving diner, while he started on the deck deconstruction.

we are removing the grill and it's gas line, because if we rent it out I don't want the extra hazard and liability

The gazebo is structurally solid but I plan to paint the posts and seal the rest of the wood so it stays that way. The deck needs new boards and rails, it had not been sealed or maintained in years so rot, holes, and rusty nails. 😅 The truckload of wood gets delivered tomorrow while I'm at the dentist getting more root scaling done. 🙃

The good news is husband will be home to deal with his wood delivery, and I don't have to cook for a couple of days because ya' know turkey dinner.

Overdue "weekly" update

So, yeah it's been a month since I have actually written a "weekly" blog post. 😅 It is certainly not because I have nothing to write about, it's because life and its' ever shifting nature. There is plenty going on it is just personal; birthday, dental cleaning, family stuff, choices and changes.

~Life's a journey not a destination.~

~"Yes William with the pigs."~

~"I am a leaf on the wind."~

~Onward and upward~

~so be it~

I know random thoughts and quotes won't mean much to most people without context but oh well, like I said a lot of it is personal and family. 

In "business" related news, I am still a failure as far as pinterest is concerned, but I have 4 fully approved products in my google merchant center so far. I am less than thrilled with etsy new policy shtick as they try to convince people they are limiting ai use while doing nothing to actually limit ai use. 😏 This new listing and photo thing where we are apparently supposed to add one completely raw unedited photo to each listing for physical items, because that will convince people. 🙃 

Look I understand that ai use has gotten out of hand but this is like closing the barn door after the horse has already run free, too little too late, you are not going to recover public trust after years of not policing your site. They encouraged people to over-edit their photos and use ai on both photos and listing descriptions, so now they want to say "no not like that". Furthermore, if they truly wanted to re-gain the public's trust they would actually rollback the production partner and POD shit and do something about all the IP infringement. But they never will because people buy that shit and etsy gets rich off of people buying that shit.  

As for this new policy, I refuse to comply. I will not edit all my listings to add the worst photo because I do not have "raw unedited" photos of all my stuff and I'm not unpacking it all just to take bad photos. I take my photos with a nice fancy camera which takes large file images that I put through a resizing program called faststone to crop and shrink file size to save space on my computer, they are never getting "raw" images from me because the files would be too large to upload. 

This type of policy rollout going into a holiday season is BS busywork and I refuse to participate in this round. 

at least the cats are happy 

Wow. . .just wow

When goimagine closed 5 months ago I moved to square; it seemed simple at the time, however, it was a whole new site builder with strange navigation and many steps. 

Well apparently, I screwed up my shipping settings, and my checkout has not actually been functional, like at all, like all bloody year. 😫 

I have seen "Cart" called out in my google analytics, so I KNOW people have carted items and tried to purchase. I had been writing it off as abandoned carts, things aren't cheap, sometimes with tax + shipping totals can be higher and cause people not to complete the purchase, so I was trying to not let it bother me. 

Seriously though it has been bugging me for months that I haven't had any orders all summer, it's not normal, but again trying to not let it bother me because the whole world is not normal right now. 

Anyway. . .it should be fixed now, hopefully, fingers crossed that I may actually get some orders and have a decent holiday season. I am still fighting with pinterest catalogue issues but I'm not giving up.

I have always loved photographing clouds at sunrise or sunset; they make the most spectacular displays. 

In other news; I got my flu shot, updated my voter registration, and we are painting and working on the laundry room this week. (finally) 😅

When we moved in, we started with the main hall, master bedroom, living room, dining room, then guest room, and hall bath, so the laundry room wasn't really a priority. 😅 But we've been here a couple months now and I hate the washing machine that was here, I want my Maytag super capacity back. I will continue to live with the existing Whirlpool dryer because it's gas and my Maytag is electric and path of least resistance. 

I swear one day I will get back to making things. 😏

If at first you don't succeed. . .

Try, try, again, that's how the saying goes anyway. 😏 

After what seems like an eternal battle with pinterest and the mystery 1403 error that literally is not even in pinterest's own help pages.

I got an email reply from their support and as it turns out it's pretty simple; you cannot use a google drive for the photo storage. no, seriously, that's what they told me. 

Why the frack can that not just be in the damned instructions to begin with?!? 😒 So as I curse and roll my eyes and delete the last half dozen failed uploads, I find myself annoyed but determined. I will get this done, tech be damned, I will not be defeated by a stupid spreadsheet. 😐

In spite of being sick for the last week I am slowly working on my shop, although, in some ways it looks worse ever. 😅

just a big ole' mess of exploding boxes 😅

I realized I haven't listed the ornament sets on the website yet. I should probably do that soon-ish since holiday shopping season is coming.

so frustrating

Technology can be so frustrating; as a genXer I loved my 
Atari and my first computer was a Commodore64, so it's not like computer stuff is new to me but the current state of technology is stupid. 😐  Seriously, I've been doing the e-commerce thing for like idk 15 years or so, from my original stand-alone leather site, thru etsy, goimagine, michaels, now on square, I've been around this block. 😏 

However, in recent years it has become so frustrating that I just want to rage-quit every other week. 😠I try and try, I follow all the rules, and guidelines, meet all the requirements, fill in all the forms and check boxes and still errors, glitches, and rejection. 😠

I'm left just wondering why I bother and if any of the spent energy was actually worth it. 

I once spent many many hours over a period of multiple months to get a facebook pixel to work and connect with an online shop only for facebook to disable all pixels 3 months later. 😏 (so they could force everyone to use fb checkout so fb could collect their %)

I have most recently spent time trying to get "merchant" status on my business pinterest in spite of multiple failures to get a "catalogue" to upload and function properly I kept trying. I really thought I had gotten somewhere the other day when I found I had a checkmark and approval. 

but in truly craptasic fashion the day after I post on facebook about "hey look I did a thing" it disappeared and I got an email saying 

Just to be clear my products were never being distributed on pinterest because the catalogue upload keeps failing and the url version says the format's wrong and whatever. Because the reality is from the time I got "approved" until 48 hours later disabled, I didn't post anything or change anything in the account. So, I contend I wasn't violating any of the rules, guidelines or requirements for merchants or products or I wouldn't have been approved to begin with. As for the "excessive user reports" reports for what? I don't understand I'm not violating any IP stuff, I maintain my boards and delete old pins with broken links, what are users reporting?! And if there are a bunch of complaints about my account/pins why have I never been notified of a single one?!??? 😕

Furthermore there are a limited number of appeals 2 and the box says to make changes first, but I don't know what to change since nothing has changed since the approval it's not like I can just undo the last thing I did because I didn't do anything. 😒

So, I admit I am basically wasting my first appeal to point out that I don't know what to change based on their vague "reasons", lack of directions, and fact that I changed nothing between approval and disabled. If they reverse it based on I called them crap then it proves the disabling of my account was total BS, if they can give me something specific they want changed great, if not fuck 'em I no longer care.

That's settled

First Key is a crappy corporate landlord that doesn't follow its' own procedures and I'm glad to be rid of them. We did not get our whole deposit back because they took the final utility bill out of it and charged us $350 for pressure washing the exterior of the house (which was filthy when we moved in).  I'm annoyed because all the emails and instructions said the final utility bill would be sent and paid separate, never once was it mentioned anywhere that they would just deduct it from the deposit but that's what they did. 😏 So I'll work on letting go of my annoyance and instead just be glad to be Done with them. 

I didn't post last weekend so one would think I'd have a bunch of stuff to write about this week, but I've been sick, so not really. 😕

I have worked on the mirror in the hall bath, but it still has layers to go.

I have re-hung the living room drapes (finally)

I decided, I am not putting sheers back, because I like my view and natural light. 😉 Plus the ones that were in the living room I used in the dining room, because the ones from the dining room fell apart when I tried to wash them, 😅 not at all surprising considering the very thin nature of the fabric and the decades of sun damage. I did look at/for new sheers for the living room, but I didn't find any I really liked so unobstructed view it is. 

side note, the cats are very happy with their new yard and the country quiet 😇

Yay. . .it finally arrived

When we bought the house, we discovered the dishwasher was broken, disappointing but easy to fix right?  I shopped online looking at different brands and models, checking sizes to make sure it fit the opening, checking noise levels because the deaf-man don't like loud appliances. 😐 It took me a few weeks to decided, then I went to the local appliance store, independently owned, small business, of course they didn't have one in the store, but they agreed to order one and let me know when they could install it. I didn't mind waiting, I don't like handwashing dishes but it's not that big of a deal. 

It should have arrived last week, but the lady called and apologized because their delivery truck never came last week, found out later it was a dispatching error the wrong trailer got attached to the wrong truck and drove to Ohio. 😕 I didn't get angry, I played it cool, we had a laugh about. This week's truck arrived and had my dishwasher on it, yay!

it's nothing fancy just a fairly standard whirlpool in white, it's so quiet 💖

I am really happy with it, it was a good install, I even enjoyed chatting with the appliance guy. 

I am working on my shop off and on, but I still have a bunch of stuff to do in the rest of the house so it's slow progress.

I am getting ready to tackle the hall bathroom. I've got the towel bar, toilet paper holder, hardware stuff. I've got the new toilet seat and curved shower curtain rod ready to go. Yesterday we picked up a new faucet because it was half-price and I am changing from shiny chrome and gold to a brushed nickel finish, not sure why there ever was a chrome faucet under a gold mirror to begin with but I cannot take the mis-matched-ness, it's ridiculous. I am painting the medicine cabinet, the gilt/gold around the mirror never matched, I don't know wtf they were thinking, but I do know it's a cool old Sears medicine cabinet so I'm planning to keep it and just refinish it. We'll have to wait and see how my plan works out with the layers of paint, I'm going for a distressed, antique look with a white base and silver finish. 

I did get a photo of the drapes that sort of shows their color better, but I am starting to realize part of why I love the drapes so much is they are just like my car, the color seems to shift depending on the lighting and the viewer, so are they burgundy, purple, maroon, etc. don't care. I don't have to name the color to tell you I like it. 😇