Updates

Well hello everyone! Hope you're having a fabulous morning, evening, or night - whatever it is in your neck of the woods. Here it's 4AM and I'm delirious with exhaustion but I can't seem to pull myself away LOL.

I don't know if in my last post I gave any specific dates for any releases, but if I did I apologize for not making them. I've been in a bad slump the past few days. For a couple of days I threw in the towel and said...forget it! I quit! I almost considered giving up designing altogether. I gave myself a couple of days break - and sure enough, it did me good.

I've come to a decision, and it may be a bad one for business but it is something I have to do.

I have noticed that since I started designing, my TMJ flares up quite a bit more. It's flaring up a little on me tonight. Maybe exhaustion, who knows lol. Anyway, my TMJ really bothers me and when I have a flare-up it's almost impossible to do anything. It's impossible to work, take care of my son, I struggled with cooking supper tonight - at least without going off the deep end. It's becoming increasingly difficult to get rid of these flare-ups with pain medicine, and they are coming more often - since my last trip to the doctor in fact, I've had pain almost non-stop. I have short day-long breaks in between - but it seems like the past 3 or 4 weeks has just been non-stop pain and flare-ups. I have to take pain medicine for this. I've been on several different medicines. I was first on Ibuprofen, a large dose, and that stopped working. They upped the dose, and it stopped working again. Needless to say, now I'm on Darvocets. I don't like it, I especially don't like having to depend on heavy medicines to live my daily life, but if I don't I suffer so I'd rather be on medicines my whole life than have to suffer. And until I can afford to get in to see an orthodontist, or whoever it is I need to see for this, that is the only choice I have.

I believe that designing could be one of the culprits. Stress is a major cause of tension for me, and TMJ is all about the tension because it's in the joints. I get stressed when I don't think I'll make deadlines, or when I haven't put out any new product. The creation stresses me out too. I'm always my own worst critic on my kits. Anyway...I've decided that in addition to cutting as much stress as possible out of my life, getting back on the WiiFit to start doing some yoga (it seemed my pain was almost non-existent when I was doing yoga exercises), seriously changing my diet, I also must cut my designing time down. I will only be doing designing part-time. This will unfortunately mean less new products from me - at least I think. I've surmised that maybe if I'm less stressed and only spend a couple hours a day on it (rather than 7-8 hours like before) that maybe designs will come more often. I've also decided to make a couple of other changes, but those will be implemented and announced at later dates.

With that said, the Halloween kit is now almost finished. I was on a "vacation" as I like to call it, but inspiration hit tonight. I need to finish up the previews and work on an alpha and then I believe it will be done. I will try as hard as I can to finish tomorrow and package it all up for a POSSIBLE release on Friday. However...I won't do as before and kill myself in order to get it there lol. So I won't make any promises but I'll get it out before Halloween.

Now, with THAT said...I still consider myself on vacation. LOL I've gotten my house nice and clean, started on a new hobby, visited with my family (we took a day trip to a fabulous place, more on that later) and scrapped some pages of said trip, with TONS more to do. I've even tried out some new scrapping techniques that are way out of my comfort zone. I'm rather enjoying my vacation, so don't expect anything new on the horizon for the next couple of weeks (other than the Halloween kit). Like I said, I won't kill myself in order to get new things out, but I will do what I can.

I'm SO tired so I'm going to wrap this up...I do have plans still to work on a fall kit. I also have some plans to release some CU stuff. I just don't know how that will go now that I've decided to go down to part-time however. We'll see. I had wanted to put out a birthday kit to celebrate Isaac's birthday, but it doesn't look like that will happen. He's having a pirate party anyway lol. Maybe a pirate themed kit, who knows. I also still want to release maybe 2 Christmas kits. We'll take it one day at a time, and see how it goes. However, I will still have a blog train ready to leave the station. I haven't heard a word from some of the other designers, so it may be later than planned but that's ok...it will be plenty worth the wait! I'll let you know if I hear any word on that. That's all for today, I gotta get to sleep, got to get up early in the morning. Have a good day/night!