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...

I've Said it Before

But it bears repeating.

Don't bother buying expensive beds for your furry feline friends.


They prefer a cardboard box.

Wow, I woke up today and was in total shock. I had a sale for 37, yes, THIRTY SEVEN items this morning. Whoa.

I was in a total panic, though, because I was running short on ball chains for my pendants and didn't know if I had enough to get the order out. I used to pack all of my pendants away with the ball chains included but then thought that if the pendant never sold, the ball chain is being wasted sitting there in a box, so I started adding the chains as the pendants sold. Which worked pretty well until today. When I had to go over to Michaels and pay 2.99 for ball chains because I didn't have enough here. I had been holding off on ordering more because I really didn't have the money for them but finally broke down and ordered 100 of them yesterday from this wholesale place online. But of course they don't get here overnight and won't be here until sometime next week. A little too late for my big order this morning.

Then, of course, I had to go get a box to put everything in, went over to Office Depot and got one but when I got home realized it was way too big, so had to go back and get a smaller one. I did make it to the post office before the mail went out today, so it's on it's way to Australia. I was thinking maybe I should send it fedex or ups so I could track it, but after going on the ups website and finally filling in all the little boxes correctly after about 3 tries because whatever I kept filling in apparently wasn't what they wanted to know, the shipping calculated out to 140.00. What? So, regular mail it is, and hopefully it will get there okay so I don't have to refund the big huge order back to the buyer. I get nervous with big orders going overseas, but, knock on wood, I haven't had one go totally missing yet. By the way, it was only 17.64 to go first class mail.

Anyway, it was a nice way to start out the day but now I'm worn out. I've been having pain in my leg like a pulled muscle or something and it's been really hard to get to sleep because it hurts when I lay down in my usual way of laying down, and I've had to take a tylenol p.m. to get to sleep. Then I still wake up at my usual time no matter how late I finally get to sleep. So, I'm tired tonight. And I get to lose an hour of sleep because we have to spring forward tonight. Well, not really lose an hour, just wake up at my usual time but the clock will say it's an hour later. That is if we remember to set those clocks ahead.