Hi Everyone

,
It's great to see you all!

First of all, congratulations,
Kenge, on learning that
Nubbs is a boy! How exciting for us all to finally know, and for young
Nubbs to already have such a large extended family all interested in him! :-)
I'd meant to write in to this thread again much sooner, but then got sidetracked: It's so funny,
Sandy , when you mentioned the ups and downs of the first art gallery we were in (which I wrote about here at length way, way back on this thread as some of you probably recall), and I kind of mentioned vaguely that there were some ups and downs again this time around, except I haven't talked about it much this time, since the place is a lot more public and visible than the previous one was...
Well, to make a long story short, the online group gallery we were in quite suddenly ceased to be a group gallery on April 15th. The owner converted the group gallery back into just her own store, some of the artists formed their own group gallery, and others of us congregated and formed a support group on Facebook (so now Ron and I are at least finally on Facebook and learning how to use it!

), where we are encouraging and advising each other as we are all in the process of re-starting our own eBay stores again and scrambling to get back up to speed and reach a new equilibrium as soon as possible. Whatever else can be said for the experience, during the six months we were there, we at least acquired a whole lot of invaluable skills and knowledge from a master marketer and highly successful art seller that we can now take back and apply to selling on our own again. Following the lead of several of our fellow artists, we've been working long hours each setting up our own art-only websites and blogs, and reopening our stores. I'm about 1/3 of the way through relisting the ton of ACEO (art card) prints that I had up there before, but with an updated template, so it's all been tons of work and long nights (including several near-all-nighters -- I've been kind of sleeping from about 4am to noon on average lately on the nights when I've gotten enough sleep

). Fortunately, though, some of my customers from the group gallery found me, along with some of my old customers from before the group gallery phase, so I've actually been doing quite well so far for just starting out again.

We're definitely starting out way ahead of where we were when we first started out on eBay a little over a year ago now, so that's a good thing.
A friend, upon hearing about this, jokingly said to me and Ron, "You guys should write a book on how to close an art gallery!"

It's true, we must still be working out some resistances to making a living from our art for us to have attracted such an experience twice in a row!

But at least this time around, the whole thing was much better and at a higher level than the last time, so at least we're progressing!
Well, back to work soon for me, but I've been wanting to write in and say hi for ages. By the way,
Sandy, we did try that basil lemonade, and it was pretty good, very refreshing! Now, after a period of trial and error, we've started putting raw spinach into all our smoothies because it interestingly doesn't have much of a taste (whereas lettuces, which tend to have less vitamins, seem to have a much more detectable taste), but is so nutritious, and it's such an easy way to get extra servings of vegetables. It's one of our best discoveries of the year so far!

Now it'll aslo be so nice to get past this hectic readjustment phase and eventually get back to healthy habits like exercising and meditating and such. Never a dull moment around here!
Oh yeah, I have a really cool story for you all -- a few days ago, I ordered Doreen Virtue's Archangel Michael oracle cards, and the very next day, someone named Michael bought a copy of my Archangel Michael print from my store! And there was a "444" in their address, AND they lived in a town called "Paradise!" How cool is that?!
Lots of Love to All

,
Aqua Deb