Friday, August 13, 2010

The Electric Bill

We got the electric bill yesterday and I have been not so breathlessly waiting for it to see if our efforts to save a little money on it have worked or not. PG&E did raise their rates this year (of COURSE they did) but with our new blinds in the living room and the new dark screens on the windows, and setting the thermostat at 80 instead of 78 and keeping said blinds closed and all, I was hoping we had saved a few dollars and used a little less energy. And whaddya know, we did use less energy this past month than last year. Same number of days in the billing cycle but we used 926 kwh this year and 1106 last year for an average daily savings of 5.7 kwh. Not bad. I am kind of wondering if the savings was just because it hasn't been as hot this year so far, but the other stuff we've been doing has to help some too, right?

But, then I got to thinking that the blinds cost us about $135.00 and the new screens around $80.00, so the $25.00 or so that we saved on our electric bill this month wasn't really saving much after all, but we did need the new blinds because the old ones were just awful, and the screens were so full of holes that not just mosquitoes were getting in the house but full on gigantic moths and other bugs could just walk right in through the screens, so...the new screens were well worth it.

I'm taking a few days off from etsyland. I've been getting so discouraged and depressed what with constantly listing new things in the shop and checking views and not seeing much in the way of sales that I just need to take a break and either quit all together or just give it a rest for a little while. It gets so obsessive because in order to be seen on Etsy you have to list a lot to stay up front in the search, but there are just so many other shops now and so much in the jewelry category, like millions of items, and so much plain old junk and cheap imports that your little Etsy shop gets buried under the mire in about a minute.

I took another look at Zibbet yesterday to see if anything is happening there. They are rolling out a new front page soon that looks a WHOLE lot better than the current front page, and I do have a free for life shop there, but it still looks like nobody is buying. I checked the site ranking on Alexa, and Zibbet is down around 300000. Etsy is at like 328 or something, so...yep, nobody is shopping on Zibbet and no matter how pretty you make it look, don't think it's going to be much competition for Etsy any time soon. Even Artfire ranks like 28000, way higher, and there isn't much going on in the way of sales over there, either.

And, then again, it could be that nobody has any money to spend on frivolous crap from Etsy. Sigh...

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