WonderfulGraffiti

Oh, No! Website Down

When we got in to work today, we discovered that our sales were zero over the weekend. Turns out Wonderful Graffiti.com isn't accepting credit cards. Well, there's good news for you.

Neysa, who has been our site's go-to guru for the past few years, will look into it. In a while. Because she lives in New Zealand and she won't wake up for another four hours from now.

Happy Monday. M.

Corporate Coffee

A relaxed Friday morning is a lovely thing, but the slower pace makes me lethargic at the keyboard. I need my three morning swallows of coffee.

I'm not a coffee drinker by nature. I'm such a bundle of energy, no one wants me to have caffeine. I'm not crazy about the taste either. But after a fabulous restaurant meal, it's the perfect excuse to hang out a bit, ignoring the scowls of the waiter who wants to turn the table one more time.

I believe I would drink more coffee if it wasn't for Geord. He likes black coffee. Inky black coffee. He buys Black Silk, the "boldest" coffee Folger's makes. A little arrow pointing to the far right of the boldness scale on their package says so. I think he adds double the amount of coffee recommended and decreases the water by half. He'll have a cup in the morning and take swigs of it cold throughout the day. I've told him he should just chew the beans and throw some water down his throat. Even my dad, who grew up on a farm in the upper midwest and knows what strong coffee is, says  "whoa" whenever he drinks it.

Three sips of Geord's coffee is all it takes to send me flying. After adding water, sugar and one of those little cups of flavored creamers to a quarter cup of the stuff, it's still strong. Okay, if the coffee were weaker I'd still add the sugar and creamer. But I wouldn't have to add the water.

Maybe it's all for the best. As I said, no one wants me to have caffeine.

Twitter Is Stupid

That was one of the teasers on the cover of this weeks Newsweek. It's nice to hear that someone else thinks what I've thought all along. Oh, I've added my tweets to a few of the most popular tweet topics (I'm sure there's a super cute name for it). Like whatnottowear and threecondiments. That was fun and some of the tweets were very funny, but really, what's the point? And who cares that I ate a tuna fish sandwich for lunch? Like the writer said, it's  kind of egotistical to throw constant updates out there and think anyone cares.

If I were watching twitter all day, I could keep up with the people I follow. I can't understand half of what Ashton Kutcher tweets. I'd rather catch up with friends and family on facebook–and I don't do that as much as I'd like. I like texting but only on Geord's iPhone and he's not always around.

I want to go back to the days of handwritten notes. Delivery by stagecoaches.

Store Test Delay

Remember how last week I said we had complete and final approval? Alas, it was not to be. It seems while the department manager approved all aspects of our project, the marketing review board did not. We're told we'll have that answer tomorrow.

And this recent news: we'll need stickers made for the outside of the cartons containing our shipping materials. Color-coded to the department, project number, store, etc. We don't have our project number yet. When we do, we'll have to have a sticker company make those stickers for us.

And so it goes.

At The Cabin

A lovely time was had by all. Weather was perfect. Walks. Fishing. Reading. Fires. Wall-E. Sitting on the deck looking into the trees. We all missed Mackezie though. She's our meal planner, packer, unpacker, organizer.

We came back earlier because Ryder had a birthday party to go to that involved paint guns. I came in to catch up on work because the next week will be wild. Just noticed that a customer placed the same order seven times. Is something wrong with the site we should perhaps look into?

How To Relax On Weekends

Here's how we're going to do it this weekend.

We are driving 45 miles to a cabin owned by Mike the author/illustrator of our new Storybook Windows. From the photos of it he's sent, it looks straight out of a storybook.

I'm taking hot dogs, baked beans, fruit & veg, cereal and maybe a roast chicken pulled out of my freezer. I'm taking my yoga mat. Ommmm. The weather will be beautiful. And there's no cell service unless you climb a very large hill.

And this just for Meg: I'm going on a picnic and I'm taking marshmallows, macaroni and peanuts. What are you taking? M.

New Monogram Design

Michael Hrvatin designed this brand-new Wonderful Graffiti monogram ... and we posted it on the site yesterday. We have two more Graffiti monograms to put up tomorrow (photo problems) that I really like a lot. Our clients tend to go for the more traditional designs, but my designers are young and not so traditional. They'll design a batch, we'll go over them, selecting and revising. I'll always throw a contemporary design into the final picks to humor them.

PS. Michael's last name is pronounced "her va tin." It's Slovakian.

Custom Colors For Place Cards

We created these place cards with pop-up table numbers for our Chocolate wedding collection. We worked with a bride named Sarah to do them in her wedding colors. She also ordered our mini luminaries and say-anything sign in the same color scheme. I was nervous because each of those things use different materials and take ink differently. It took us ages to fine-tune the colors but in the end I'm pretty confident she'll like them.

I Used To Have A Front Yard, But Now I Have...

... vegetables posing as annuals and the neighbors don't know the difference. 

Poor Geord

Our websites are both custom-made just for us. No off-the-shelf parts for us. That gives our customers lots of choices but it often gives us lots of headaches.

For reasons not entirely clear to us, the product administration part of the wedding site had tons of junk at the very top of our product list. To change anything about any of our products, you'd have to scroll down an enormous list of the junk. Tedious tedium.  So Geord decided to fix that. In the process, he accidentally eliminated almost all of the prices for everything on the wedding site.

This past weekend was one of those early fall days with a sky so blue it fairly breaks your heart. (That line's not mine, but I don't know where it comes from, sorry.) Geord spent both days at the office, putting all the prices back. Poor Geord. M.