Well, it's been a long 2 weeks

Yea, for the Emporium! Recently the Emporium donated several crocheted items to be donated to New Hope and to the Samaritan program where we contribute handcrafted baby clothing and 7-inch or 9-inch squares to be made into baby blankets. New Hope is a local charity for battered women and their children. Some of the baby stuff goes there as I understand it as well as to Moses Lake's Samaritan Hospital. The squares go into making patchwork baby blankets to be given to new low income mothers for their babies.

For the past 2 weeks I have been very busy. Been helping friends with transport. Took them to Moses Lake for appointments and commitments to SkillSource and GED testing. The waiting time between each stop was filled with quietly working side by side crocheting, reading or writing. Some of the time was also spent swapping stories, figuring things out collectively, kidding around and laughing. Towards the end of this week it was taking turns napping.

There has been a lot of time for me to have some time to think. Think about what it is I want to do and what could be done when and where.

Here is what I have thought about in regards to re-inventing myself. I have been thinking about going through SkillSource's OIT program and then getting a job, if possible. In the meantime I will be spending my business hours transcribing whatever tapes I have from my clients, maybe adding one more client and researching the possibility of doing something in the psychology field.

Whenever I have no tapes the business hours will be doing something related to the Needwood Emporium.

Now upward and onward toward working on doing small repairs - the toilet, the fridge and my car! Tune up tomorrow!!

Happy 12th Birthday, Nathaniel!

Well, today we've spent the whole day centered around Nathaniel as today is his 12th birthday. He had what he wanted for breakfast, lunch and dinner and lots of presents. He is a very happy kid today. It has been a great day for the whole family.

The rest of the week I will be busy transcribing and preparing for the fair. I have only two crochet projects that I will be entering this year. One is a hand crocheted tank top for Jenny and the other is a curtain panel to be hung on the front door.

This coming weekend we've planned on converting some closet doors into shelves in the studio to hold lots of stuff. Which means a lot of moving stuff around, lots of sweating, hauling and lifting. Some of the things that these shelves will hold will be supplies and equipment we use in producing Needwood soap and candles. Possibly even some of our inventory as well. Should be fun.

With it now being August, I find myself reflecting on where I am in my life now and remembering things from the past. I feel a need to go home or rather to go visit my parents whom I have not seen in over 3 or 4 years now. Since I last saw them a lot has happened. My daughter went through nanny school and came home. My son was diagnosed officially as having Aspberger's Syndrome. My longtime love and husband of 22 years, Rick, died suddenly in November of 2004. My parents decided to put the old farm up for sale which sold earlier this year. They are getting settled into their new house now. I have had to get my license again and had to get another mode of transportation since my station wagon's power steering line broke. I have another car but it needs a tune up which I want to attempt on my own. Wish me luck.

Learning to stand alone and independent again has been a long road since Rick died and I still have a long way to go yet.

Somehow through feeling a great need to see my Mom and Dad again and feeling melancholy, I also feel a great excitement for some unknown reason, a feeling of looking forward. Could be its just because it is August and time to get ready for the upcoming school year. Even when I was a kid I always looked forward to the coming school year. This year Nathaniel will be home schooled through a new system. It's home schooling and public schooling combined. It's called Washington Virtual Academy. Nathaniel and I are both looking forward to it, which reminds me we both need to finish paperwork for it.

It will be a good week. Now I feel a little like writing a story or something else. Perhaps I will share it here soon.

Why spend a lot for cat toys?

I thought I would mention today what we use for kitty toys at our house to occupy four rabunctious kitties. For practically free kitty toys we use a couple of things around our house. The first thing is an 89 cent package of chenille sticks. They make wonderful kitty toys. They seem to last forever even when being continuously left in water bowls.

They kept my rather high energy tom cat, Xander, occupied for hours when he was younger. It even became a nightly bedtime ritual. I took a lot of them and twisted them into circles. He would bring a circle up on the bed and drop it next to me. This meant, "play with me". I would throw it and he would play with it for a little while and then bring it back to me whereby I would toss it again for him to ran after. We did this nightly ritual of fetch for many months.

Another game that we developed was a form of "catch". I would toss 3 or 5 to him. If he caught one he got 2 points. If he missed, I got 2 points. We always did the best out of 3 or 5. Guess who won most of the time? He did, naturally. Now that he is a year old he doesn't seem to be interested in playing together with me anymore. Lately, he also started taking to putting the chenille circles in his water bowl in my bedroom. I am almost positive that its his way of saying he thought they needed to be cleaned up to his standard.

The second thing we use for kitty toys that cost almost nothing are plastic drinking straws. These are especially useful for the kitten who seems to have a need to chew much like a dog. We have a young tom, Pavel, right now who spends hours playing with his straws, batting them all over the place, biting them, tossing them up in the air and kicking them. If you have ever seen kittens or cats playing with feathers then you will recognize these as a good substitute, especially if you don't have access to any chicken or goose feathers.

One other thing that we use and have had good luck with so far is keeping a couple of strings hanging from door knobs as well. Nathaniel's young female, Duchess, is rather partial to these strings. She makes them do all kinds of things.

Well gotta go now. The dishes are calling me...

Revving Up

Its Sunday. A great day to rev up and get ready for the coming week. Something to look forward to every week.

Between appointments and transcription duties will be squeezed in turning in paperwork to various places. Another thing to look forward to is possibly getting a phone call from Vrieling Financial of Moses Lake. Cross your fingers that I get the job!

Bills are all written out and will be going out in the mail in the morning. My daughter will be going with me so that she can pick up an application so that she can apply for a job.

Will be praying for my business partner and best friend, Dianne, as she faces surgery this week. Also praying for a young man that I know facing surgery himself as well as a couple of other people that I care about.

Needwood Emporium will be in the photo study this week to update pictures and inventory.

I should start writing up some of the cat stories that I have as I watch our little pride grow. The cats we own number six altogether. Their names, from the oldest to the youngest, are Rebecca Wednesday, Tikki Dawn, Alexander 'Xander' Harris, Gregori Pavel, Duchess Longclaws, and Tucker John.

Well, good night for now.

Welcome to the Needwood Emporium!

Welcome to the Needwood Emporium from one of the people behind it. Let me introduce you to the Emporium. The Emporium is a partnership made up between two crafty small business women and their own businesses.

I am Laura Stalter and I own Laura's Menagerie, a subsidiary of the Emporium. I am partner in the Emporium. Together with my partner, Dianne George who is the genius behind DiFarms, the other subsidiary.

After a long hiatus, I have begun to come back to working on the Emporium, it's website, photographing inventory, data base work, and a lot of other things connected with running our business.

What do you offer you may ask.

The Laura's Menagerie side of the Emporium creates some of the hand crocheted hair nets or "snoods", small hand crocheted items like sachets, sewn items, and handmade soaps. This is by no means a complete list. It's just an itty bitty one.

Currently I am working on many projects - all having to do with updating the Emporium website. The one currently at the top of the list is to photographing items to be added to the site. Right below it but no less important is that of integrating a shopping cart to the website so that our customers can place and pay for their orders easily.