The Mandelbear's Musings

The last remaining orders will be in the mail in about an hour. Still need to consolidate the databases (actually flat files, but PayPal and paper are in different formats) and make sure I haven't missed anyone with my haphazard piling[sic] system, but at this point I think it's done.

The final count brings me up pretty much to C0 (decimal 192) with a handful of "interesting" numbers reserved and a few sitting around at work and at home waiting to be sold. Call it 175 pre-orders, which is enough to cover my production costs and most of the artwork. 70 to dealers, which easily covers the rest of the artwork. Four through CD Baby, who are presently out of stock -- their shipment should be arriving today. (Need to be a little more pro-active there -- waiting until they get down to one disk doesn't really give me enough lead time.)

Need to print some more business cards and fliers.

At this point I've packaged up all but about a dozen of the pre-orders -- mostly the international ones, plus a handful that came in too late to get into the database. Hand-delivered two yesterday, and sold a couple more. I have a few out with the chaoswolf in hopes that she might sell a couple at the BASFA meeting. (9:42 she sold 2 sets and a single.)

But there's light at the end of the tunnel -- I'll have the rest shipped by the end of the week. I've built sets numbered through BF plus a scattering of requested or special ones past that, and have started burning my last spindle of 50 blank ABT's. (I only ordered 250, which was probably a mistake, since it's supposed to be an edition of 256 and a couple ended up as coasters. I'll have to label a few blanks myself if I ever sell that many.)

Not that I've done much else today, apart from a 4-mile walk and a shopping expedition to Sears, which netted a pair of folding plastic sawhorses, a power sander, and a canister vacuum cleaner. The latter was the main reason for the expedition: it was top-rated in Consumer Reports, and it was on sale this weekend. (Actually I got the next model up for the same price I would have paid for the one CR tested.)