Still Crawling Along

It was a very productive week for Blue Hills. I opened a two-year account with InMotion Hosting, secured my domain name, created email addresses, chose a template, learned BoldGrid (their WordPress site editor), and got halfway through building the website (creating five pages is taking a lot longer than I had expected). Meanwhile, someone hired my wife to copy edit a 300-page young adult novel; she's going to delegate that work to me. It won't be a Blue Hills project, but it will be my first editing income in years. I should earn four months worth of Curio City salary in a month or less. 

Curio City, OTOH, went through another one of those frustrating dead zones that make me suspect technical malfunctions. My only sale in three days came when someone called to complain that the shopping cart wouldn't calculate her shipping charge. Everything looked fine and I placed her order without any anomalies, so it was probably user error...but that complaint kept nagging at me as the drought dragged on. February is always a slow month anyway, and eventually things returned to slow normal...which, at this time of year, is just one sale a day. It's a good day if it's a big sale and a poor day if it's a small one.

I don't know how long dividing my attention between two businesses is going to work out. It's easy to do while Curio City's in a slump and Blue Hills is still in development. Ideally, Blue Hills will occupy me from January through October and I can concentrate on retail in November and December, but in reality it won't separate that cleanly. I'll just have to make it up as I go along. 

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The people at Switchables admonished their former accounts that they have not, in fact, gone out of business, but merely stopped selling wholesale. Although that's the same thing as going out of business from my perspective, they are still selling off their remaining inventory at retail on their own website. They could probably make a nice go of it as an exclusive retailer if they were inclined to remain in production -- even if their costs doubled, as they said, so would their revenue without us middle men. 

Anyway, from the consumer's perspective they are still alive and kicking. The record is hereby corrected.