How Do You Sell a Seahorse?

This cute hand-beaded seahorse keychain from Guatemala is one of the items I sell in my online store, Tapir and Friends Animal Store. I love that it's RED! So bright and colorful! And for people who lose their keys, what better than a red keychain? After I receive it from AtitlanArts.com, I give it a part number and a name. In this case, it's: "F1977 B218 - Seahorse Beaded Keychain from Guatemala, red." The "F" stands for "Friends," and it preceeds every part number, making it easier to recognize it for the part number it is. If the number were only "1977," it might be confused with a year or the last four digits of someone's phone number. 

Every item is stored in easy-to-access bins. The "B" part of the part number is the bin where it's stored. Believe it or not, it took me nearly 10 years to figure out that if I included the bin number with the part number, it was a no-brainer to find the item! When an order comes in from our shopping cart, the bin number and item number appear with each product. Here you will see Bin 218 if you click to enlarge the photo. Current numbers are on "ecru"-colored tags (off-white), while green denotes some leftover old numbers.

If we open Bin 218, it's filled with ziplock bags Every small inventory item in the store has its own bag. There is the red seahorse in B218. And it has the part number on the bag. Voila! Easy to find, and no confusion. I think those may be unicorn keychains in the bag next to the seahorses, and I see some beaded frogs in the back of the bin. In the case of these medium-sized beaded frogs, it would say "Frog Style 1" on the bag, because that's how it's coded on the web site.

My web page: tapirback.com.

Fantastic Bargains and More

My new page style for the painted pins has been so successful that I'm going to apply it to two other categories I've been playing with for years: bulk items and special, unique, oddball, few-of-a-kind. These two have been tough so far because all my ideas until this one have been labor-intensive or they didn't work. This one is pretty fast and not at all cumbersome. And it's versatile.

The bulk/discount/fantastic bargain page is up, but I've only listed anacondas and herons with frog so far. These orange horses are next, and after that I'll get started on the unique and special items page. Each page can easily accommodate 25 to 30 listings, so it will be very useful.

A recent goal was to rethink abundance. Things do seem to be flowing better.

This blog is sponsored by Tapir and Friends Animal Store.

Shaking Loose, Part 1

Something shook loose this week and I began to follow up on my mini-success with eBay by posting more things for sale online, and all in places other than eBay. Some of them I've posted before, but most  have been sitting around anywhere between years and decades waiting for me to do something with them. Amazing. I really do feel a new energy moving in my life. 

The trout above is one that Les left here on consignment. After all this time I finally figured out an easy way to put larger numbers of these painted pins in the store so people can get a good look at them and it doesn't take forever to put them up and then take them down again when they sell, as the quantity of these older designs may be from one to just a few pins of any design or paint style. One of the quick(er) ways I'd been putting them up looked nice, but they were not optimized well for Google, and that has become the Holy Grail of anything you put online these days. If the Big G can't find it, forget it. When each pin had its own page they optimized much better, but it was too cumbersome to make sense. If the pin happens to be an elephant, it may look the same each time, but if it's a trout it may come in more styles than you can count on two hands. I needed a way to post more of them quicker and not lose our great placement by switching to a new web store entirely. What I'm doing now is a hybrid system, and I think it should work.

I had to show you another unusual trout (above). I've loved these pins ever since I came across Les and his booth at the Seattle Gift Show one year. We do sell some pins right through the year, but not nearly as many as I'd like to. Hopefully that will be changing now, and my goal is to get several hundred more animal pins posted in time for Christmas sales! Think I can do it?

After I finished the trout I moved on to tropical fish. I especially love this beautiful triggerfish.

Next I did the frog page. I'm not sure what animal I'll work on tomorrow, maybe more sea life.

So much for the Tapir and Friends Store. I decided to do something with my own artwork finally. I've posted this collage (a different style for me, but funny) on this blog before, and I decided to get my feet wet the other day by making it the first item in my new Etsy store: TapirgalLovesArt. Corinna has been selling stuff she makes and making money for TPF donations for a number of years now and she recommended Etsy as a venue. So did a discussion Catherine sent me recommending Etsy over eBay for vintage and hand-made items.

A detail from my first Etsy posting.

Here's the second Etsy posting. Maybe a weird choice. I called it "Space Girl." It didn't have a name when I made it in 1980. I have so many pieces of artwork in unmanageable old portfolios that I took the first candidate that was going to photograph OK and looked interesting enough to use.

I sure wish Blogger would get the orientation right. Facebook and Blogger both had the same problem with another photo I posted a few days ago.

I didn't say anything about this one when I put it on the blog before. I guess the symbolism is whatever you want it to be. I made it in 1983 when I was living in Corona and feeling disconnected. It was my third Etsy post, so I moved from not personal at all through a sense of insecurity to intense feelings in this third one. I plan to put more up tomorrow, not sure what it will be yet.

This blog is sponsored by Tapir and Friends Animal Store.

More schizophrenic weather in Astoria

This is basically the same shot as I posted yesterday morning, it's just more densely white. Snow in Astoria is rare anyway, although we've had more of it in 2008 than in most years. We're supposed to be in the midst of a storm right now. It's been a bit schizo, with wind and chill, heavy snow, then rain, then bright sunny skies, etc. What we're expecting now is a big freeze, although it was supposed to start a few days ago and it didn't happen. This time it's looking more likely. There's less slush to freeze today than there was a few days ago, but there's still enough of it. Streets of glass is what we're talking about for this weekend, it seems.

I took the photo above this morning looking west along the River Walk from our place near 15th Street.

This is looking out to the river. Yeah, nice green bushes, all covered in white.

Indoors, it was warmer, and we're still scrambling to get orders packed up and shipped. We also have a lot of incoming inventory for the last seasonal push to fill new orders and get backorders out. One of the UPS trucks got delayed due to the weather, so we have one shipment that won't be here till Monday. In all, Sue and Barbara have been doing an incredible job. Lee pitched in and filled orders for a few days before he left for Bend. Now he's over there and it's inadvisable to drive back this weekend. Whatever is going on here, it's colder there, although it's drier. He thought Saturday might be a good driving day, but now it looks like Saturday will come with a lot of snow and icy roads. Barbara couldn't get in to work from Washington, so I packed up orders nonstop for two days and got behind on my computer work. She made it in today by getting a ride with someone with the right tires. We don't all get snow tires here; it's usually very easy to get through winter without them if you live in town. Sue came in every day. The road up near her house was a bit slippery, so we weren't sure from day to day, and I don't know how I would have handled the Christmas rush without her. We'll see what happens with the weather over the next few days. I haven't been out that much, mainly since I had things I had to get done on the computer. If we have snow and not too many orders, I may put my boots on and go walking. For anyone who doesn't know, Astoria is built on hills like a mini San Francisco, so it doesn't take much ice to make life in this town pretty interesting, and this weekend we could have a lot of it. I've rented some movies and stocked up on food. If Gimre's is open on Saturday, I may try to get those crampon type things that attach to your shoes.

I liked this pic of the Coast Guard ship noodling around just past our catwalk. I'm not sure what it was doing. It apparently sent out a small boat from the mothership, but I didn't see where it was going or why. The CG has been on the river a lot lately.

Here are the little birds I had in an earlier blog post (December 14). Thanks to Tom Means, I learned that they're called buffleheads. Wikipedia says they're one of the smallest ducks and the name comes from "buffalo" and "head," because their heads are rounded. The females are the ones with the stripe that's about the size of your finger. The males have white over a big chunk of the head, looking like a large white piece of pie. I thought I hadn't seen any, but looking back at the photos, I did see some bad pictures. I'll keep working on my buffelhead education and also try to get a good photo. They winter in protected river areas like ours, it seems.

This was a site. The river pilots work in inclement weather, for sure. What else are they going to do? It was snowing fairly hard, although the long lens condenses the flakes more and makes it look nearly opaque.

Interesting lighting. That's the pilot boat out there with the ship. I couldn't read the name through the snow.

In awhile the sun came out, and melted the snow from the sunny side of many objects. It didn't get much above 32 degrees today. The other day most everything melted finally, because the temp was around 38.

It stayed sunny and beautiful most of the afternoon. This is looking east along the River Walk. The entrance to Marine Drive on the right is 15th Street, and I'm standing just in front of The Animal Store.

Schizophrenic weather in Astoria

There was some ice this morning, but not a lot. We'd been told to expect a heavy freeze, but it didn't come through. Most of the dark stuff is water on the pavement.

There was a bit of snow, but it hadn't penetrated the trees and the lees of buildings.

Inside, Santa's helpers spent the day packing and shipping lots of boxes, including last-minute inventory that arrived with no time to put it away.

This is 15th Street and Marine Drive. Schools were closed, in at least in part of our area, so I was surprised to see the bus. I thought the yellow and warm earth tones were pretty in contrast with the snow.

Snow and also raindrops on the kitchen sage and grass. The weather couldn't decide what it wanted to do today, so we got a mixture of stuff.

See what I mean? These pictures are in order. Now it's snowing like a maiac.

Two river pilots are either coming from or going to work. Nice day to go out on the water in a small boat and climb a ladder onto a ship, yes? They laughed a friendly greeting when they saw me taking their picture.

Then it cleared up again, sort of.

Here's the radio tower and our building on the left. It looks like a balmy summer day.

From inside The Animal Store a resin parrot and plastic meerkat take note of the scene.

After everything calmed down and melted, it hailed. Most of the white stuff in this photo is hail. Let's see what tomorrow brings.

Flood watch in Clatsop County

It's been raining for a couple of days and today Clatsop County is under flood watch till this evening. It shouldn't be too bad in our location. Everything runs into the river. I took this from our Animal Store (Tapir and Friends) gift shop window. This small lake was a parking lot until yesterday. Actual flooding is more likely to occur further south in Seaside.

Evening colors on the Columbia River

These two photos were taken from the back deck of our store. Online the store is Tapir and Friends Wildlife World. We simplified the name for our brick and mortar location (or rather siding and pilings location) in Astoria, because it's the rare customer here who knows what a tapir is before they arrive, and we thought "The Animal Store" would be easier to remember. We get the occasional person looking for dog food or cat collars, and we direct them down the street to the pet store. More and more, people arrive out of curiosity or because they now know us and are looking for an unusual stuffed animal or other animal-themed gift for someone in town.

But that's a digression. I took these photos because I enjoy the changing colors. In this case, it's nearly sunset, and the river has taken on a peach-hued glow. If you click on the top picture to enlarge it, you can get a better view of the faint long line at the left just above the water. This is the Astoria-Megler bridge, crossing the four-mile span to Washington. The light sliver of color at the top of the photo is the sky, while the darker peach color which makes up most of the background is the shape of the hills across the river. The dark gray post at the left is the railing of the River Pilots' building, where the guys sleep when they're off-duty.

The pilot boat passes by several times on an average day, taking river and bar pilots to the big ships going up river or out to sea. The bar at the mouth of the Columbia is one of the most dangerous places in the world for a ship to leave or enter the ocean. It's been called "The Graveyard of the Pacific," and many wrecks lie at the bottom of the channel. The pilots have distinct jobs - there's a pilot to guide the ships across the ocean, another to guide them across the shifting bar at the mouth of the river, and yet another to guide them up the Columbia River to either Longview or Portland. It's interesting here in Astoria to watch the pilot boats take the guys out to the ships and bring them back. This is one of the changing points. Another is on the high seas, and we can't see that operation from here. The pilots climb up and down ladders on the sides of the ships, and we can see them from various points in Astoria, including here. I'll post pictures of that activity at some other time.

The second photo shows the base of the radio tower that still broadcasts signals from several stations. The transmitter room is in our building. On the right is the back end of what used to be Englund Marine, a well-known nautical supplier, now moved to the other end of town. Condos are planned for the site. I'm dreading that, to be honest, and have signed a petition to block it. I've heard that the design is very nice, but one of Astoria's best features is the river and the views. The condos will be three to four stories tall and, equally as bad or worse, they will extend much wider than the current building, blocking more of the river view east of us. Now that I'm on my soap box, let me note that in Europe, rivers become the heart of many cities, with parks and public walkways featured. In the US, probably a vestige of when our cities were built - the industrial era with its focus on productivity, not on the preservation of nature or particular consciousness of esthetics in that sense, we've backed our industries up to the rivers. When I lived in Palisade, Colorado, near Grand Junction, you could barely get to the Colorado River at any point in Grand Junction proper because of the industrial parks or buildings that owned the riverfront land and made eyesores out of it. Shortly before I left Colorado, they began to build a river-walk trail outside of town, which was very nice, but nobody yet had addressed the river as being a potential beauty mark of the town. Astoria does have an extensive river walk with an extension planned in the next few years, but here we're schizophrenic about it. We've got the walk, used by many for walking, jogging, biking, skate-boarding, and sight-seeing, which is fantastic, but then we plan projects like this condo, which will block access from the walk to the river front, and views from the hill behind and from the highway (or Marine Drive, as it's called in town). One of the things I love about this place is the view of the river and beyond as you drive into town, and in a number of locations that's already been obliterated since my arrival in 2001. So anyway - the old building is shown here in the glow of evening.

The Body Shop at Home Foot Fun Party at The Animal Store in Astoria

On Tuesday, April 22, I hosted a Body Shop party with Lee's daughter (and my good friend) Laurel Sullivan as the consultant. We held it right in the store front, which was a little unusual, but entertaining. It was a lot of fun. You can read more about it and see more photos on Laurel's blog. Today in my office we downloaded the photos and she made her blog post about the party. I snapped her picture (below) almost unannounced. She must have had a clue I'd picked up the camera, because she smiled big when I called her name to get her attention. We did it in one take! Brunch and blogging. What a nice way to spend Sunday. By the way, Laurel puts on a great Body Shop at Home Party (that link is to her Body Shop web site) . . . if your'e in the North Coast area and are interested, send Laurel e-mail and she'll be happy to set up a party to pamper your guests. I have to say, I've given very, very few parties over the years, and she made it easy. I also have not been much of a product person (of course, I enjoy bubble bath and such), so I'm enjoying being introduced to a new age of smells and sensations. It really has been fun. Now I have to get to the gym, so I'll keep this short. More to come soon, as always!

Laurel at my computer