Sometimes I Can Have Nice Things

This is not a post I had planned to make. In fact, all planning crashed with my laptop's hard drive on Friday the 16th. I had suspected that it was dying, as I'd already had to run CHKDSK on it a month earlier, so my most critical files were backed up. After spending all day Friday and part of Saturday trying to revive Windows, I finally performed last rites. Curio City itself is a shopping cart on a remote server, so it wasn’t injured in the crash. But everything that I need to manage the business – a couple of Excel files, a couple of Word files, my QuickBooks company file, my Outlook database, and my browser settings and bookmarks -- was on that hard drive. I was paralyzed without that handful of files and programs. I decided to close the store.

I recovered my backup from Jungle Disk – a service that I’ve been running for years, but had never before needed or tested -- and brought my desktop computer up to the minimum functionality required to tend to both of my businesses. Ordinarily I keep my personal life on my gaming desktop and my work life on my business laptop with no crosstalk between them, but now my desktop would have to step up to cover my Blue Hills workload. I could safely put Curio City in stasis, but I couldn’t freeze Blue Hills.  

You might remember me musing that Curio City might buy me a new laptop this year. Suddenly that thought turned to how quickly I get one and how much I could spend, so I spent all day Sunday shopping. My last three laptops were all cheap, utilitarian Dells. Because Curio City’s days are numbered, and because I'm optimistic about Blue Hills' future, I decided to splurge on a low-end gaming laptop instead of getting another unwanted boring business machine. Even though I couldn’t access QuickBooks to see exactly what my balance sheet looked like, I had a pretty good idea that I might barely stretch to afford it. 

That complicated things. High performance isn't cheap and Curio City isn’t rolling in money. After two days of intensive research and shopping, I bought a Dell Inspiron 15 7000 with a very good GeForce video card for under $1,000. Of course, that deal was online-only. That meant waiting up to five business days for delivery. Well, February is slow in Curio City anyway. It could stay closed, and I could keep pecking away at Blue Hills from my desktop in the meantime.

The box from Costco arrived on Thursday, and I had the store open again last Friday. Business has returned to normal (which isn’t saying much, but it’s something). I had neglected to back up a few files, such as the database for my postage program and my browser bookmarks. I lost all of my web graphics. Once upon a time, a file with thousands of verified postal addresses would have been a salable asset; nowadays, not so much…and my published privacy policy prohibits selling customer info anyway. Not that anybody else would have known…but I would have. 

After the financial dust settles I need to find the money for a game that will show off my screaming new GTX 1060. So far, loading QuickBooks is the most challenging thing it’s done. It does that admirably, I might add. 

Missing a week in a weak month left February’s numbers incredibly anemic. Let’s put it this way: Curio City only paid me $117.29 for the entire month – before taxes. I need to pocket $600 a month to support my lavish lifestyle. I’m finally getting year-over-year Blue Hills numbers, but they don’t mean anything yet, so let’s just look at the customary Kraken Enterprises as a whole:

February

Total income: -40.5%
Payroll: +46.3%

Marketing: +100%
Net Income (Profit) vs LY: -435.8% (-$1,536)

Actual Profit/Loss: -$1,222

YTD

Total income: -36.1%
Payroll: +43.4%

Marketing: -57.6%
Net Income (Profit) vs LY: -388.5% (-$1,757)

Actual Profit/Loss: -$1,305

A nice big loss bodes well for next year’s taxes, and means that I don’t need to take any write-offs yet. Payroll is up while revenue is down because 85% of Blue Hills income goes to payroll. Sales are down because...well, have you been paying attention or not?