AshesFromStars.com

This is crazy; I’ve made over 15 pieces of jewellery today. As well as having to go to Head Office for a meeting which was a complete and utter waste of time, there wasn’t any point in me going there to ‘learn’ things that I already know about. That’s 4 hours of my life that I’ll never get back.

It was a good laugh though, got to meet some of the managers from the new shops and seen some people that I’ve not seen in ages - managers from other shops and my two mates from my old shop. That was worth the effort going.

As for the jewellery, I’ve sold 10 things since Saturday morning. Three online through the website and a few to friends and my mother’s friends. Plus I’ve covered all my expenses so far so everything I make now is profit, until I start buying charms and chains again!

Day off tomorrow and I can see myself spending the entire day doing absolutely nothing apart from catch up on all the TV that I’ve missed over the past week.

I admit that I’m pretty lame at including photographs in posts regularly here at AFScom. It mainly comes down to the fact that I constantly forget to take my camera out with me, half the time I forget something simple like a jacket when it’s cold so it’s no wonder my digital camera gets left at home.

It’s a shame really, because photographs and pictures really make a blog in my opinion. I love seeing what people are up to, what their families look like, where they went on holiday - through their eyes.

One way to include blog pictures is to sign up for acobox.com where they host photographs specifically for you to post in your blog. You can add your own photographs for others to use too. The best bit? None of your bandwidth is used up as acobox.com host the images on their own site. Bonus.

I’ve had a look around their site and the have loads of images, all in categories such as ‘panorama’, ‘urban, ‘abstract’, ‘animals’, ‘plants’ plus loads more. And there are some great images on there, I love the one above it’s gorgeous and usually I’d expect to have to pay to use such an image through a stock photography website. It’s definitely one of those sites to del.icio.us for future use when you’re in a pickle for a photograph!

Uh, the new release of Twitter Tools has a bug. Sorry for everyone who got 100+ ‘weekly Tweets updates’ in their RSS reader. It’s disabled now.

I’ve had such a busy weekend, done more than I usually do and it’s made me so tired even though it was fun.

On Saturday morning I spent about 4 hours (and £30) finding charms, memory wire, pendants, beads, findings, chains, business cards, well everything really for my new website - honeybee-designs.com - where I’m selling all the jewellery that I make. I opened it on Saturday morning and I’ve made £20 already. Like, that’s crazy. I didn’t expect to make anything until I’d added all the stock and advertised it a bit more. The best bit? I only sold two items, a matching earring / necklace set to one girl. I’m thinking that I’m going to have to spend more time making jewellery than I expected. The fun bit is actually sourcing everything that I’m using to make my pieces, I’m especially into finding antique / vintage jewellery and giving it a new lease of life by updating it and making a brand new piece from it.

Later that night I headed down to the boyfriends house, where we started watching Law & Order Special Victims Unit. Gosh that program is sick but I actually really like it even although some of the cases that they’re solving made me feel ill. At around 8pm I had this sudden thought in my head that I didn’t have my shop keys to open up on Sunday morning, surprise surprise I’d left them in the shop safe - again. So I headed down to the shop to pick them up and decided to pop along to my friends Andy and Carly’s house/flat warming party. They’ve just moved into a flat just along from their work (my old shop) and 10 minutes away from my work so I couldn’t really not go see them. Part of me wishes that I hadn’t as I was so tired in work the next day and there were two people there that I don’t get on with (an other supervisor and his boyfriend, who I’d only met that night. Oh my god, camp as hell. Usually I love camp guys but this dude was overwhelming with his high voice and annoying habit of trying to talk to me when I wasn’t interested). The other part of me is so glad that I went - I love Andy to bits and I miss working with him so much. It was a great night, and I’m seeing him again on Thursday after a meeting at the work’s head office, yay!

Sunday during the day I was working, which was boring. When I was filling out the wage sheet I realised that I’d worked 54 ½ hours last week - that’s crazy. If you include Sunday (ie working Sunday-Sunday) that’s 64½ plus 3½ hours unpaid lunch breaks. No wonder I’m bloody tired.

Since I’d done so much in the shop over the past week I decided that we were having an easy day; everything was done and not much needed doing, just paperwork and tidying up. Although I did find out that my idea of an easy day and the staffs are two different things. It’s starting to piss me off how little they seem to do, or slowly. There’s two members of staff that are awesome and two that aren’t quite so awesome to work with. Funnily enough it’s those two that dislike me because I expect them to work. Hello, you’re in work getting paid, I’m going to make you do something for that £5.57 an hour. Like I’ve said before though, I’ve done the whole making friends in work thing, now it’s all about me getting my promotion and running a fantastic shop. I don’t care if they hate me, it’s my job to make sure that the shop’s run to the best standard that it can be and if that means I expect you to work stock then damn right I’m going to tell you when you’ve done it wrong and make you re-do it. Hah. No wonder I’m known as the bitch (in a loving way, you understand) with my ex-workmates.

1. Websites had version numbers in the titles - like AshesFromStars.com version 26 - punkrawk!
2. Everybody had plugboards in their sidebar?
3. We all felt rather ?
4. It was mighty important to tell your visitors what you were currently wearing, drinking, eating, watching, thinking…
5. Greymatter and Bravenet guestbooks ruled the ‘net
6. Speaking of sidebars, why did we have them 100px wide with 6pt justified text? Or was that just me?
7. Scrollbars were coloured to match layouts, especially when they were for an iframe
8. exotic backgrounds included black and white grid boards and punky photoshop brushes yanked from LiveJournal icon communities.
9. We didn’t use words for navigation, preferring to use 001, 002, 003, 004, 005 with no title tags instead.
10. TodaysDomainOnline.com was the place to plug your site?

Needless to say, I just found one of my old websites and cringed.

For example:
reviews.chemical-69.org
hellodarling.org
sparkling-stars.co.uk

lookiez I made a layout for glowenshi and it bloody well rocks! I love it love it love it love it love it! hehe…it’s totally, and utterly….well go see for urself anf sign da gbook while ur at it! hehe
xox

- sparkling-stars.co.uk blog entry from August 03 2001.

I will go silently and die of embarrassment now.

I can’t quite believe that I’m still awake, even though it’s only 4.30pm. I’m amazingly tired, having worked the past four days and I’ve not got a day off until Saturday, then I’m in again for 4 days. Who ever said that working in a shop was easy was lying through their teeth.

Even though I was working this morning, it was only a wee half day in for stock taking which went wrong in every possible way that it could - goodbye bonus in February. Stock was missed, discrepancies were all over the place and the boss was stressed out so when he told me that I could go home at 11am I was out of there like a shot. It’s a good job too because an hour after I got home the door went, it was the postman with my Scotland hoodie, Radio Clyde t-shirt and various other novelty t-shirts that I’d ordered from the internet last week in a bid to start my Christmas shopping early this year.

This afternoon I’ve started making some of my necklaces and other jewellery for my website - honeybee-designs.com¹. I’ve got 5 necklaces and two pairs of earrings made already and I’ve bought a load more stuff to start making my jewellery out of; it’s really exciting me and the actual making jewellery bit calms me down after a long day in the shop.

I’m starting to feel that I’m neglecting the internet again - I can’t help it due to never having a bloody minute to myself. I’m out of the loop, again. But I’ve signed up for Rev.iew.me, which is a reviewing site… you know, like yoursite.nu used to be when Linda owned it. Anyway, it’s fun but I’m pissed off that I forgot to stick afs.com onto Maintenance Mode when I broke WordPress the other night and now I have two crap reviews. Gutted.

¹honeybee-designs.com has not launched, yet.

Dearest customers,

If you happened to buy food from our hot food take-away or any in-shop baked bread today I’m really, really sorry if you end up with food poisoning. It’s an outside chance, since the ovens are all on timers but just in case - sorry.

See, the boy who does the hot food / bake off at the weekend turned out still drunk this morning. Couldn’t stand up quite right drunk. And obviously I’d to send him home which meant I’d to make the bread and cook the sausages and bacon for all your breakfasts. Now, that sounds easy right? Yeah well I can burn water.

I’m guessing that you’re pretty safe with the bread and croissants and pastries that I made (apologies for the bad icing job on the cinnamon swirls!), it’s just the bacon and sausages that I’m worried about. Saying that I had a roll and sausage for my breakfast and I’m ok so we should be good.

Normal service with the hot food will resume tomorrow!

Yours,
Melissa
Supervisor who doesn’t like shouting at her staff, even when they roll into work drunk