Recuperating Monday Rambles

Well, I've still got a bit of a cough and a lot of snot.  (How can one average-sized head hold so much mucus?)  But I seem to be well on the road to recovery.  The cough is worse when I lay down at night, so I'm still taking NyQuil in the evening, which I don't like.  It makes me kind of groggy the next day.  I'd like to get back to just sleeping normally, but that may be a few days yet.  I've been taking Mucinex during the day, which certainly helps with the cough, but it's had the odd effect keeping me awake at night.  So, I'm actually a groggy insomniac!

Chiquito has the adorable little "Ack!" sound he makes when he wants attention.  I just got two of them from him.  I think I'm being neglectful....

I guess the goal for this week is catch-up, since I'm now waaaaaay behind!  I like to let my Christmas stuff sell through the end of the year, and then spend the first week of the year packing it up and freshening with new stock.  It's also my time to majorly clean and rearrange.  Traditionally, in the indoor vendor mall business, the middle of January through the middle of April is the busiest sales time of the year because people get their tax refunds and come looking for the bargains.  You really do have to be prepared to do well at this time of the year.  Last year was the first time I really put any effort into it, and it paid off big time for me.  So, it really kind of screws me up to have missed three days out of last week due to illness.

I did spend several hours there Saturday and made some progress, but I'm nowhere near where I want to be just yet.  It'll take most of this week to get caught up, since the part-time job is starting back this morning.  Fortunately, they've redone the hours a bit, so I'll have most Fridays off, but still get the same amount of hours.  So, I'll head there this morning, do my thing, then head to the mall for the rest of the day.  A junkman's work is never done!

One of the things I have to do this afternoon is move some shelving from another booth to my area.  I bought a couple of shelves that were part of a booth vacated by an exiting vendor.  They're screwed into the walls that they built in their booth.  If you build walls or fixtures, you can leave them when you exit the booth, and the mall will try to sell them for you.  They had a good price on the walls and everything, but I don't really need or want the walls, so I checked and they sold me the just the shelves.  Now, I'm not the most handy person, but I do think I can manage to get them unscrewed and moved without any major problems.

I'm going to use one of them for an endcap on my existing row of shelves.  I'll move my small, but growing, selection of household doodads and small electronics onto it.  Then, I'll take the freed up half-shelf that they're crowded on right now and move it over to my religion section to free up some space there and replace a pair of unsightly milk crates, which are getting on my nerves and proving woefully inadequate to the task at hand.  I'll take those over into my book booth and use them to help organize some magazines that used to belong to my mother.  I just put them out on Saturday and don't really like the stacks.  Once the magazines have sold, I'll put the milk crates back under one of my tables until I need them again.  (The mags are really only temporarily there.  In a few weeks, I'm going to recycle whatever is left of them,  I only put them out on a lark.  There was a stack of them left from when my brother and I finished going through Mom's things, and I thought "What the hell?  I'll try to sell a few.")

The other shelf I'll use to replace a baker's rack that I took over to YesterNook on Sunday to fill in a spot left by a large piece of furniture that sold.  I'll put the things that were on the baker's rack on it.  Currently, they're temporarily residing on a neat wheeled shelf I got off a departing vendor a couple of weeks ago.  Once it's cleared off, I'm going to roll it over to the spot left by the half-shelf in the paragraph above.  That will create another endcap effect at the end of my other row of shelves, which will nicely mirror and complement the other newly-created endcap, which it will face across the entrance to my booth area.  I'm going to move my Pyrex, Fire King, and other Anchor-Hocking stuff onto it, and then redo my kitchen and glassware shelves with new stuff.

Whew!  You gotta have some sense of vision and some kind of a plan to do this.  The end result will make my space look totally new, in time for the tax-time shopping rush!

I've still got more I wanna say, but I'm exhausted after typing up everything I've got to do.  Come back tomorrow for more!  And get well wishes to my pal, Roger Green, who shared his own health news in my comments last week.