distracted

You know the emails. The ones that are meant to make your life easier, meant to remind you of important things like 25 percent off TODAY ONLY, or the ones that give you a bit of instruction on how to more efficiently utilize a certain service you subscribed to. I get emails from the company that prints my business cards (love that company. moo.com. They did not pay me to say that.), to remind me that I may be running out of my cards. Little do they know that I go through hundreds of cards only in the fall, when I go to several fiber festivals with my yarn.

It's funny how the language in those missives is always so....supportive and helpful, while all it's meant to do is generate more sales for THEM. I used to send out an email newsletter to anyone who volunteered to sign up for it, but then I stopped. Maybe my small business is staying mighty small because I'm not in people's inbox several times a week. I'll never know. Maybe I'm bad at self-promotion. I'm rather an introverted person, I like my quiet times, I like to create and dye in the privacy of my studio, and I tell you when the festivals are over I am done, stick a fork in me.
I LOVE talking to customers, I LOVE talking yarn and knitting and helping people find just the right skein. But it takes energy, and I need to make sure I have recovery time when the festival is over. That's all.

I am currently in a phase where I am barely posting on Facebook, and Facebook is reminding me in friendly messages that I could be using my page a bit better, to boost my "likes", and to help with sales. I'm just about ready to come out of my quiet phase, right after this morning's X-ray of my foot, on which I've been hobbling around for 10 days. It might be broken. We'll find out.

But I'm getting sidetracked. Those emails I was talking about? This morning I got a good one. It has to do with cloud back-up. There was a tiny generic picture of a woman checking her cell phone, as we are all prone to do now every 5 seconds. The message to head the picture was something about easy access to your files, from anywhere. Which is great! I like access to my files, anywhere! What puzzled me was what the woman was wearing. She had on a suit jacket, a mountain climber's safety helmet, a chain around her neck that may or may not have been jewelry or a lanyard for an ID card, and she was standing behind some kind of bar like the ones they have on treadmills. I THINK that they were trying to convey that she was at a job site, had forgotten certain files at the office, and was now looking them up on her phone. I was so confused about that image, first thinking that she was a mountain climber checking her phone. Then I saw the suit jacket. And that chain around her neck - completely detrimental when rock climbing.

I'm getting sidetracked again. The question I actually have this morning, is this: Why can't we be in just one place at a time any more? I miss that so much. I love being connected, I love being reachable by my daughter when she needs me, I love getting her snapchats, I like being able to follow up on etsy convos late at night when I check my phone one last time. But. I miss being able to do just one thing, and I don't know if I'll ever be able to get back to that. It's as if it's too late, once you're in the system of the almighty messages from all the social media, you can't get out. I can't imagine being able to run my business without them, so I do it, I stay connected as much as I am able to manage. Because if I don't do it, someone else will.

Tomorrow or the next day, I'll tell you how alllll this translates into my knitting.

And by the way, there's a tiny bit more yarn in the shop. ;)

incidentally, this colorway is called "climb every mountain".