I just realized that I hadn't posted in over a month! November has been pretty busy, though!
We had a nice, relaxing Thanksgiving. It was just Johnny and I again this year. All the kids had their own things going on. I'd considered hosting my family again this year (we'd done it in 2014 and 2019) but it's always so stressful and I just wasn't up for it this year. It never fails...whenever we have people over for Thanksgiving, things don't go smoothly at all. :P We typically make a bigger turkey which ties up the oven for a long time. Then other things don't seem to get done in time. One year I turned on the crockpot for the mac n cheese...only to discover that it hadn't been plugged in. :P There's just so much going on at once and lots of people in the kitchen...it feels like chaos. But this year we had zero deadline for when anything had to be done...and I got it all done at relatively the same time without trying very hard. :P I didn't even bake the breads the night before like I usually do. And with fewer people eating, I just make turkey breasts in the pressure cooker instead of a whole turkey in the oven. It only takes about an hour and I don't even have to thaw them first.
Work has also been super busy this month. Sales were slow during the first part of November...but they picked up A LOT starting the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I ended up breaking my previous record for total orders (from both Etsy shops and eBay) in one week (Sunday to Saturday)...which was 36 orders. The week of Thanksgiving, I had 45 orders! I actually ran out of the glassine bags that I use for packaging before my new ones were set to arrive. Luckily Amazon got them here pretty quick so none of my orders were late going out. I love being busy, though! :)
During the slow part of early November, I used the downtime to make some new custom name designs using individual letter graphics and got a lot of them listed before I got busy. I even sold some of the new designs in the last week. :) I still have more letter designs that I want to make...but I'll have to wait for some more down time.
Most of my recent sales have been for magnets...which are largely made to order instead of keeping them in stock. They're more expensive to make than my stickers so I don't want to have a lot of unsold inventory. I do try keep a couple of the popular ones on hand...which at the moment are my spreadsheet design and the flamingo design that says "Don't make me put my foot down." Since 11/26, I've had 68 orders and 36 of those orders were for magnets. I'm really glad that I changed my listing photos to make it clear that each design can be a magnet or sticker...because it has greatly increased the amount of magnet orders since then.
While I'm working, I usually binge watch shows that I've already seen...that way I don't have to really pay attention to it. I just look up at the TV to see my favorite parts. It's my emotional support background noise. ;) I'd been watching a lot of 24 and then switched to Virgin River. I really wish December 19th would get here so I can watch Season 6. There's not a whole lot of episodes to binge watch Virgin River...so I've gone through it several times now just in the last few weeks. :P And then last night when Johnny and I were getting ready to eat dinner, I noticed that Martin Henderson was in the photo for the Australian TV miniseries, Secrets and Lies. So I decided to watch that last night after I was done working. I watched all 6 episodes...largely to see if my prediction was correct about about who the killer was (and it was...I'm generally pretty good at predicting TV shows and movies). It was a good show, though. I think the rest of the week I'm going to switch to Reacher. That's another show with an upcoming season that I'm excited for! It's probably my favorite current show right now.
Ooh! We're waiting for my birthday present to get here! :) We ordered the Whisker Litter Robot 4 during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday says. So I'm hoping that really works out well. It's supposed to arrive Thursday. We also picked out our Christmas present...which was a new set of non-stick ceramic cookware. That'll definitely be nice...since I've been using the same pots and pans (aside from a few new pieces here and there) that I bought in 2005 (and my pasta pot is from 2003). LOL. My favorite large 5qt sauté pan definitely needed to be replaced. So hopefully the new set will be good. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out which set to get. :P
Well...I should probably get some more work done before I go to bed.