This business has its ups and downs

Day306
I had planned on showing a few more election sites tonight. (I hope you voted today – I did.)
But, the past few days of working on my store have been so frustrating I thought they could give you a realistic picture of running your own online store!

2 days ago when I was adding all the Christmas pictures to this blog, Blogger decided to act up. It uploaded the first 2 pictures fine, but I couldn’t get it to take the next two. After trying over and over and refreshing again and again I decided to put the pictures into photobucket and upload them from there. They moved over alright – dragging half of the title underneath up and in between the pictures.

So I messed with that for about 30 minutes. When I finally got the title back where it belonged the pictures were quite a bit closer then the pictures above were, which didn’t look good at all.

After much trial and error and another hour I had everything on the way I wanted it and held my breath while I hit “post.” Normally posting something I’ve already written takes about 10 minutes.

Some days are just like that.

Then for the past 2 days my image basket in the back end of my store has been full of red Xs where images should be. CafePress was aware of it and working on the problem. However when I discovered it, I was in the middle of submitting classified ads and every other picture I uploaded was a red X. So I would have to choose a different picture. This not only took about twice as long as usual, it changed the look of the ad I wanted.

I suppose in both cases I could have saved those tasks for sometime later on, but my list is too long to put things off.

2 good things happened in the middle of the mess: I sold another Amazing Grace t-shirt and The Small Business Brief Newsletter told about my store as a place to shop for Christmas gifts!

Time off!

Day172
I’ve always heard that one of the perks of having your own business is you can occasionally leave it for a day or two or three. That you have greater flexibility. This week I have been helping on a church mission week and have to be at church every morning at 5:30 to make breakfast for all the kids, pack up their lunches to send them out on the road and clean up. I get a few hours off (today I came home and mowed my yard.) and then go back at 3:30 to start working on dinner, watch the crazy games and participate in the worship series. It’s very rewarding, but I don’t understand the “take time off and your business keeps going” promise. If I am not actively working on it every day it seems to come to a stand still and my list of “work things to do” keeps getting bigger.