Happy Anniversary

Well, its official - we are parents. lol. What do you do when you have a whole evening sans child and its your anniversary? You've just had a romantic dinner (steak au poivre, roasted red potatoes, asparagus, sour dough bread and sparkling apple grape juice - so SO good!) and now you're both relaxing comfortably. You start with a romantic back rub and then you fall asleep! ROFL.

I know, how sad is that? I mean I am PMSing so I'm not exactly feeling lovable right now but I still think its funny. And a little bit sad. But oh well. We'll have all day Saturday to celebrate and so we'll have a second chance at romance. lol.

Today was a very good day. Very productive. Caleb has almost returned to his regular nap schedule (the trip to Houston plus a growth spurt really messed with his sleep and therefore my sanity), so he was absolutely charming and I was not about to fall over tired and Breonna came over the watch the Coo Bucket and I was able to get a lot of work done designing the web page.

Namely, I got the main welcome page sketched out, content for the site outlined and we've got 3 of the 5 logos done that I need, we've picked our color scheme, but now we needed to pick wall paper (for banners etc) and flourishes. So I went and checked out istockphoto.com - which is AWESOME and found a few dozen options but then I needed to consult with my business associates as to what exactly we wanted.

So I made a call and thankfully 3 out of 4 of them were in one location and available RIGHT THEN for consult so I left Caleb with Breonna and made a mad dash to Kathleen's house to get opinions. I was only there for like 45 mins and we were super productive! :) We narrowed the wall paper options down to two (I'm going to edit samples into our color scheme for final approval) and picked out a set of flourishes (that thankfully match both wallpaper options) and narrowed the logo pool down some.

Current logo pool status goes: 3 down , 2 to go. We've got Mon Ami, Whimsical Garden and Sparkling Elegance done. Now we're just trying to hash something out for Kathleen's Per Lei and the company Beads Just For You. We finally narrowed the BJFY logo down to two options but it was agreed that the 2nd option is too plain and needs a revamp before the final decision is made and we got Kathleen to commit to which fonts she liked (kinda) so now I'm going to come up with some logo options and hopefully we'll get a winner in the first batch.

I have to say working with a bunch of artist is a unique challenge... lol. Mostly because we all have such different styles (which is why we work so well jewelry-wise) and such definite opinions. Getting everybody to agree on the same thing and getting something they like is, I must say, more difficult than I anticipated. But the good news is that I think long term we've got some really awesome options and its going to be wonderful.

The Voice, The Web and I wanna play with Memory Wire

Before I begin - I HAVE A FAN!!! COOL! Thanks Janet! I feel loved. lol

So I'm taking a crash course on web design courtesy of some training videos on Adobe DreamWeaver my Dad hooked me up with. I need to learn this as fast as I can b/c I've got a dead line on a project and I discovered that a feature in Filemaker does not work quite like I had it explained to me (or maybe I just misunderstood) but so basically instead of publishing the database to the web like a website its more like a website you can use to log into the database. So it works great for say coworkers to log into and enter stuff remotely but not so much for customers to come surf your site. Apparently how you do what I want to do is you build a webpage and then basically sneak the db in the back door.

And I have built webpages before but it has been YEARS and a lot has changed and since I don't want to push my deadline back (again) I'm trying to get a refresher as fast as I possibly can. Thus we come back to the videos. And they're actually very good so far. She's very clear, if VERY basic to start. Its kind of annoying when she explains things very, very, very simply for the rookies, and repeats it several times, but oh well.

Over all it wouldn't be bad except for the voice. You know that phone voice? The one that says "Press 1 to be hung up on, Press 2 to gouge your own eyes out, Press 3 to be put on terminal hold" - THAT voice, the perma-perk-june-cleaver-soft-spoken voice, she talks like that. And on the rare occasion that she does crack a joke (which I don't mind) it becomes glaringly obvious that she is a she-nerd, cat lady. The kind of cat lady who has 10 cats and their names are all "Mr. Tiddles", "Fluffy" and "Precious".

Long story short she seriously needs to get out more, and I am force feeding my brain her voice for hours on end (when the hubby is home to take care of the wee one) so that I can learn this crap as fast as I can.

On the upside tho - the big changes in web design are a GOOD THING. I mean WOW! Like it used to be you put Button X on 50 different layouts. Then one day you decide you want button X to be PINK and not BLUE. Welllll... back in the day you had to change button X by hand on all 50 layouts (shoot me now). Well now you can use CSS - so you assign a style to button X that says its this size, and this font and this color. So if you want to change it you just go in there and change the color from blue to pink and PRESTO! the change has been made on all 50 layouts. Sweeeeeeeet!

SO! (can you tell thats my current filler word of choice?) my new latest design obsession in jewelry is memory wire. My aunt Lois (who I will say has AWESOME taste in accessories, and well, everything but...) had the most awesome bracelet on at dinner on Sunday. It was a LONG coil of memory wire (which is stainless steel wire that has been treated in some fashion to make it super strong so it holds its shape) like, 8+ loops and it had been beaded such that almost every loop was a different pattern, so it wound up looking like she had a stack of bangles on but it was just one long thing. And it was super easy to get on and off and really really cute. I want one. REAL BAD. So now my goal in life is to get me the hook up with this fun toy cuz I wanna play with it.

And it wouldn't be expensive b/c I priced out the memory wire and its not too bad at all and it was just done with czech/chinese glass and crystal beads so those are cheap and look good and you could do this in sooooo many colors and styles and it would be sooooooo pretty. I want to do an entire LINE of these bracelets.

I tend to get stuck on a theme. I see something I really like and then I go do my version of it and do like a half dozen different designs along the same theme until I tire myself out of it and then I find something else that strikes my fancy and go for that one. It works for me I guess.

BUT we need to start selling our product if we want to buy more materials and that means that your genius here needs to stop blogging and get her tushie to work learning how to build the farking site.

So... later!