(no subject)

Bah. The new exclusive distributor thing means that unless I quit my job, get a loan, and start running Greenwood full time, it isn't viable. I've looked at it every way, and the end result is that every time I put in an order, it would need to be for closing on a thousand euros worth of material at retail. And unless I get out and chase people, advertise, and so on - a full time job, really - I can muster that about every three to four months at most. Which means that by the time I get the order in, half the people who want stuff will have gone and bought it elsewhere. So Greenwood will be put away - we'll keep the business name, in case the distributor situation improves, but for the moment, no more game selling from here. Remaining stock can be got at a 33% discount, more if you get a few things.

Memo to self: go get sterling for the weekend.

(no subject)

On the plus side, this does mean I can start thinking about what books I want again, rather than what books customers want.

Meh, I say. Meh.

Today, I am curiously apathetic. I have difficulty getting up much enthusiasm for work, but now that I'm on lunch (where on lunch means I can open Opera and do non-work stuff around food and work, rather than one of these la-di-dah leaving the desk lunches some people get), I'm having a rough time mustering the will to as much as surf the web. The hum of the fileserver behind me is soporific, and at any moment now, I may actually doze off. It's not that I'm tired, really; there's energy here all right. It's just below the surface someplace.

And work keeps piling up, and I'm looking at it in an disinterested, abstract way, calculating the time to shovel it away into the maw of the servers, and coming up with estimates varying from two hours to six days, depending on when Marketing & Co decide that that's what they want. There are seven elements of the weekend's Kentucky Derby promotions on the list; I have stuff done on six of them, and in all six, material has had to be redone as people changed their minds. This image of the web as this ephermeral thing that can change at a moment's notice has got to go; it can change in no time at all, if there are some months of work put in beforehand. If I'm kept busy changing it manually, that groundwork will never be laid.

I would like to go out and get the new Dungeon, and go further along the street and pick up inannajones' watch-pendant, in for repairs, but it doesn't look like time will permit. Time barely permits these run-on sentences with too many semi-colons.

Un-meh.

Universe Controller 1: Look, Drew's apathetic.
Universe Controller 2: Can't have that. Let's throw a few shapes at him.

I just got another call from the Mysterious Southern Caller. The entire content of the call was "Life is better with oak-rah". Now, apart from the whole who the fuck IS this guy question, I now also have, what the hell is "oak-rah"?

But, uh, cheers, whoever you are. I am no longer apathetic.

(There are sugegstions that what he actually said was "Oprah", but no, I don't think so - Southern accent, plenty of time to work out what the sounds are before the sentence is finished.)

[EDIT: iresprite tells me the word is "okra", a food eaten in the Southern US, and consisting of "long mucilaginous green pods". Now, unless I miss my English, that's "green slimy pod things". Life is better with green slimy pod things, eh?]