Neverending

Yesterday was not a good day. I went out to get new glasses which cost a fortune because I suddenly need bifocals. So I was feeling old and broke. On the way home a teenager in a car behind me decided to take his turn when it wasn't and nearly managed to get me rear ended in my avoidance of side swiping him. While I considered myself very lucky I wasn't hit, I was pretty shook up over that close call! When I got home I discovered I had lost my blue tooth. I never lose anything, so that was pretty frustrating. Luckily I found it on the back seat floor of my car. It must have fallen out of my purse and slid back there. While I was in the car I decided to throw a few things away, and instead I threw my keys in the trash. It's a big heavy ring so naturally they fell to the bottom and I had to dig them out. (Ew!) Then I was working on something that needed to be hot glued. Anyone who knows me very well knows I have a huge aversion to glue, but some projects just simply require it. I have waist length hair and managed to hot glue my hair to what I was working on.

I have also been a bit under the weather since returning from taking care of my Mother-in-law, because I was running out from a very warm building into frigid air about 20 times a day. I had bought a box of Booberry cereal that I found at Target and was feeling nostalgic over because I loved it as a kid. I had a bowl a couple hours before bed. So after I went to bed I dozed off and woke up about 45 minutes later to discover I needed to run to the powder room and ralph my guts out. It was so violent that I broke a blood vessel in my eye and pulled a muscle in front of my ear. (Sorry I know that's not a pretty visual.) But it was the perfectly rotten ending to a perfectly rotten day.

I woke up this morning feeling pretty confident that today would be better. I went through the usual round of websites and things I need to keep up with while I drank my coffee. Suddenly my usual optimistic enthusiasm has just plummeted. Trying to get a business going on the internet is exhausting. The self promotion is neverending and I am weary of it. Etsy in particular is frustating me. I have promoted and promoted and I have had 6 sales since I opened my shop in June. Not a single one of those has been a bear. There are so many people on Etsy and it's easy to get lost in the mix. It seems as if there are a lot of the same people showing up over and over on the front page, and while I think that's great for them...I wish people would mix it up a bit. They have holiday gift guides and not a single teddy bear shows up in any of them. Teddy bears are a great holiday gift, in fact they are one of the classic Christmas gifts.

So I am sitting here and I don't know what to do to generate interest. I post on my blog, which I have come to like doing. I post on Twitter occasionally which I am not quite so on board with because it makes me feel like I have tourettes of the fingers the way things are just sort of blurted out randomly. I post in the forums at Etsy, I post my work on flickr and plumdrop. I have created Mohair Divas, I post on the forums on Lollishops, I have been newly modded on Toy Collector, and of course I have my website...and I am just EXHAUSTED! I miss the old days where I made a bunch of bears, packed them up, traveled to a show and came home with a couple thousand dollars. Traveling might have seemed like work at the time but it was nothing compared to this.

If anyone has any suggestions I would really love to hear them. My Mother always wanted me to be an accountant, after almost three decades of running a successful business in the three dimentional world, I am starting to think she may have been right!