Living the Creative Life

I'm so happy to announce that my new e-book is done! It's been a very hectic week, finishing up all the corrections that my editor kept sending over, but definitely a fun process all in all! ;) The PDF version is available on the Etsy store and the Kindle version is available on the Amazon store ! INCLUDES THE FOLLOWING TOPICS: • What’s your first impression of my shop? • What should I sell? • What should I name my shop? • Do I need a shop banner? • Should my titles be descriptive or practical? • What should I say in my item descriptions? • Why do I need a seller profile? • Shop policies? What are those? • Why can’t I seem to get any traffic to my shop? • How can I tell if what I’m doing is making any difference in getting traffic to my shop? • Why am I not getting any sales? • Are my prices too high? • Who is my target market? • How’s my photography? • Should I use a model in my photographs? • Should I be on Facebook? Twitter? Pinterest? Ins...

Well, I haven't worn long pants or real shoes in about two weeks now. Lol. It's hot the second I wake up, but when the sun goes down, the evenings are very pleasant (that's when I try to do my shopping and errands). The errands we have had to run during the day result in lots and lots of sweat, but on the bright side, this pasty, white Oregonian is actually starting to tan! Never thought I'd be able to say that! I'm notoriously un-tannable. Lol. I don't know if you care to see my feet, but my sister found nearly free nail polish on her weekly grocery run, so I got three shades for $2 total! Wow! I am not nearly as savvy with couponing as she is, but maybe now that we're living nearby, some of that will rub off. ;) We had a broken air conditioner the first few days and we all thought we were going to die, but it's fixed now so we're all able to relax in a fairly cool apartment during the day. We had to dunk Carlita in the sink three times a ...

Wow this guy is impressive. I could listen to him play all night!

#1 - I now know how to pump gas I've pumped my own gas for the first... and second... time this week. Believe it or not, I made it to the ripe old age of 34 without ever having done that before. Oregon is one of the only states where pumping your own gas is illegal, so I've been privileged to have the station attendants do it for me up until now! Thankfully most pumps seem to have directions, so I'm sure I'll be an old pro soon. ;) #2 - My hair dries really fast in this hot, dry weather It's very odd to me to literally be out of the shower and in about 5 minutes my hair's nearly dry. In Oregon, I'd have to spend like 10-15 minutes with a hair dryer to get it dry. Most days I wouldn't bother and would just let it stay wet for hours. I never really thought about the fact that our very humid Oregon weather was probably partially to blame for my hair taking so long to dry! Lol. Now living in the middle of a desert, it's very interesting to be able to d...

Well we made it to California in one piece! I 'bout nearly died of heat-stroke in the meanwhile, but now my freckles are already starting to grow together as sun protection, so I think I'll survive. We started our big trip off with a garage sale last weekend. I think we probably sold about a quarter of our belongings and then gave another quarter of it away to a charity. After packing up the vans and realizing we STILL had too much stuff to fit in, we gave another bunch of stuff away. You start realizing which of your belongings are really important to you and which are disposable when you literally can't fit all of it in your moving van and have to choose your favorites! It made me remember stories of the pioneers leaving their beloved pianos and paintings behind when they traveled West because they couldn't fit everything in their covered wagons. Our first stop on moving day was to the DMV. My mom's car tags expired about a week ago! Oops! So we stopped and ...

If you use Passionfruit Ads , you got an email this weekend announcing a new pricing structure. Basically in a nutshell, a service that used to charge $1 for every paid ad (and $0 for every swap), is now charging a flat fee of $9 a month. Which... if you're making money on ads is really a drop in the bucket and will actually cost you less money. But... if you're like me and really only ever do swaps... which were free under the old system... this now means ad swaps will cost me $9 a month. Which I really, really don't want to pay. All this to say that I will honor my current swaps and continue them through the end of August (which is when PF starts being a paid service). If you would like me to continue offering ads on my sidebar, you will now need to pay for them. Honestly as much ease as PF puts into swapping, I really can't justify paying for something that I'm not making any money off of. So for that reason, I will no longer be accepting any swaps, and will b...

I ran across the interesting idea of a capsule wardrobe the other day. You pick around 20-30 items (in this case, I picked 33 items) that are intended to be worn in one season. Basically you choose items that will be mix-and-matchable with each other, typically all within a specific color scheme, along with some neutrals. It doesn't count underwear or pajamas, but everything else you would need, including accessories, for work, church, home, etc, for an entire season (in this case summer). I thought it'd be interesting to see what I could come up with for a summer capsule wardrobe that I might actually wear. ;) What do you think of my choices? Summer 2013 Capsule Wardrobe by desertrose0601 featuring a wide waist belt