Scrappers Gallery Zanesville and small businesses in general
Scrappers Gallery, the locally-owned store where love to crop with friends, has opened a sister store in Zanesville, Ohio! My friends Mary-Jo and Jen spent several hours at the store on Saturday, enjoying the grand opening celebration. Mary-Jo and I played with our respective projects while Jen just hung out with us and talked. We laughed a lot…And I mean a lot. It was a great day with friends.
While the new sister store just opened, the owners are gearing up to downsize the original store in Heath. The hard economic times have really hit retail, especially special interest/hobby type stores. The owners decided to be proactive and change things up a bit.
They decided to scale back their store in Heath, going from a 4-unit rental space to a single storefront, while at the same time opening the similarly-sized store in Zanesville. It will take some getting used to, but I know we’d all rather deal with a little less space and product than no space at all because the store’s had to close. Mary, the store’s owner, said that, across the country, 75 scrapbooking stores close every month. 75! None of us want to see Rick and Mary’s business become a casualty of this economy.
Anyway, it’s not like they’re downsizing to a shoebox. Each store still has seating for 12, and they still have the best assortment of unusual patterned papers and embellishments in town. And they still have a lot of solid colors to choose from in cardstock, too. They have albums, refills pages, adhesives, tools, and other items. They know their stuff and will special order items they don’t carry so people can have just the right touch for their projects. No, you probably won’t get the item for about a week, but hey. I can deal with that when it comes to the majority of my purchases.
Speaking of special orders, I made one on Saturday. My Christmas present this year is a Cricut Expressions automatic diecutting machine. It’s basically like a printer, only it cuts out shapes and letters with a blade instead of printing the shapes. I’d been hoping to get one and planned on getting it from Scrappers Gallery. I knew this would mean paying more than I could get it for online or from a mass *cough*wal* merchandiser *cough*mart*. But that’s okay. More on that later.
The cool thing is, Mary told me they’d decided to drop their regular prices on the Cricut line of products. They’d knocked a sizeable chunk off the product’s price, plus I also had a 20% off coupon good for that day only. Between the price drop and that coupon, the item cost less than I could have gotten it for on Amazon!
It was a win-win. I paid much less than I’d expected, and they made a sale. Happiness all around!
I love a good bargain like anyone. But my mind has been turning toward home — my home town with its businesses and the families that own them. Howie and I are trying to move more toward the adage “buy local, but buy less”. What I mean is, I would rather buy the majority of my “stuff” from local merchants, even if it means I pay more for some things. I will make up for the cost by buying less stuff. There’s nothing we really need, so why go out and blow money on a bunch of “bargains” to hoard when I don’t really need them? Why not hold on to that money and get some things I *really* want or need, but get them locally?
Anyway, buying locally from small businesses provides some intangible benefits for me as a customer. In the case of Scrappers Gallery, I receive personal service from people who know my name and know my scrapbooking style and the kinds of things I like. They provide a friendly atmosphere for me and my friends to gather and scrapbook together. Their store is a meeting place, a community center. They are good people. That means something, and I want to support that.
The same goes for Cord Camera, a chain local to our part of the country. The people at the Heath store have been there for years, and they know their stuff. They get to know their customers and can effectively advise them on purchases because of that. If there’s a problem with something I buy, I know I will not have a hassle when it comes to returning or exchanging it. I also receive free prints each month for a year when I buy my camera from them. And again, they’re good people.
Do I buy everything locally, from independent businesses? No. We still buy online and from big stores. We do try to find items from the little guys first, though. And if we see a truly phenomenal clearance deal on something, we’re not going to pay 75% more just to get the item from a mom & pop. There’s a balance to everything. We’re still finding it, and I think we’re doing pretty well.
I just want to encourage my readers to support their towns’ little guys, too. Remember, those business owners have families just like yours and they’re doing everything they can to stay open.
Avon Calling
Our local Cheapcycle group has the usual assortment of stuff for sale, with the occasional post for services for things like babysitting or housecleaning. Today I read an ad that caught my interest, and I want to share it with my readers.
Wanted: Online Customers for my 13 Year Old Daughter’s Business
I signed up for Avon so that my 13 year old daughter can sell it to
make money for her college fund. Since she doesn’t drive, she needs
online customers. Her url is http://www.youravon.com/kpassYou’ll find a link on the left for the latest brochures. Be sure to
check out their Outlet brochure. There are some really great buys in
it. Shipping will never be more than $3 and Avon will keep you up to
date on new campaigns and special promotions as well as send you a
catalog for the next campaign.As a side note here, my 13 year old joined our family when she was 8
and has made great strides during that time. She went from being a
very angry, undisciplined child to a fantastic go-getter with amazing
goals. It would really please me to know that I can help her reach
those goals. To do that, I want to ask just one more thing. Even if
you are not interested in Avon, please share her link with others.Thank you so much for your help!
It’s great that this girl ended up with a family that’s helped her to flourish! Her mom obviously loves her very much and that she encourages her in a business is wonderful. I definitely remember what I was like at 13 and I can guarantee I wasn’t thinking about goals or business. My mom and I were pretty much in survival mode, the both of us.
It’s not any more expensive than the better makeup brands available in retail stores, and they make good products. They have some great deals online, too.
This young woman’s dreams are a good thing - let’s support her! Please, even if you’re not in the market for Avon products, send her link to someone you know who is.
Camping: Day 1
12:16pm, Sunday 9/14
We are in Bardstown right now and the wind is buffeting our van like crazy. Power was out in the first section of town we went through. On the Bluegrass Parkway, Howie had a white-knucked grip on the steering wheel and we were constantly swaying in the strong gusts of wind.
It is supposed to blow through quickly and Prizer Point should be clear after 4 or 5pm. So far, there is no rain forecast the rest of the week.
We had a great time with our friends in Winchester yesterday and spent the night at the Hampton Inn there. It is beautiful and clean, plus the staff is very friendly. If you ever need to stop in that area, we recommend it!
Postmandug is here in Bardstown, right on our way, and we’re stopping by to pick up some firewood from him. That will save us a bundle (or two or three) this week.
We can’t wait to get camp set up and relax for the week. It will be great to see DG friends start trickling in mid-week.
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5:02pm, Sunday 9/14
I am posting from the phone and have limited time or I will run the battery down. 
Well, we at Prizer Point Marinara have something in common with Louisianans, Texans and everyone else who was within Ike’s extended path: Huge trees down and power knocked out. The guy who we first saw here said power’s out for about a 12-mile area. Just before getting here, we saw two trees down on power lines twice in a 1-mile stretch. I am sure this was repeated in many areas and I am glad we were on the W-I-D-E Western KY Pkwy during the high winds and not out here on the point amidst all these trees and right on the water. The wind gets really strong here even if the remnants of a hurricane aren’t blowing through! They don’t call this Hurricane Creek for nothing. You who have been here during storms know what I mean.
Howie is putting up the camper and I am letting friends and Family know we’re here. I am glad we have a good signal on the phone! We have just enough gas to go get gas tomorrow - stations were without power.
It is cool now, at least, and the stormy gales have passed.
We won’t be on the laptops until power’s back…No gas, no recharging the battery in the van if the inverter drains it.
Unplugged,
Kimberley
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7:33pm, Sunday 9/14
Hi again. Well, we called the Chevron Station on 293 and they were back hereopen again. So, we just got gas. It was still “only” $3.99/gallon. I believe the governor of Kentucky declared a state of emergency so stations can’t gouge consumers.
At least now we can use the inverter with relative impugnity.
The sun broke thru the clouds about an hour ago and we enjoyed that classic golden lit trees against a backdrop of dark gray clouds. Nice sunset here, too. Beautiful. It’s gonna be dark-dark-dark at camp tonight. We love it. Nice folks next to us, from Springfield, IL: Tom and Linda.
G’night.
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9:28pm Sunday 9/14
Until we read at our local paper’s site, we had no idea how severe a storm system it still was.
Ike left a swath of damage in his wake, from the gulf coast clear up through Canada. There is heavy wind damage all throughout the states he blustered through, tens of thousands without power, roofs gone, trees down.
Up in our part of Ohio, the roof was blown off an 84 Lumber store in Pataskala and a church in Granville lost its copper-covered steeple. The International airport in Cincy had to cancel 40 flights and a Delta hanger lost part of its roof.
We are going to recharge the cellphones using the inverter. Nice being able to keep in touch. We’ll try to power the Bunn coffee pot in the morning. LOL Inverter is 300-watt and has override safety. Have to look up Bunn’s wattage.
Hacked, but back
Twice in the last few weeks, my site’s been hacked. Whoever did it used it to send spam out, which resulted in my website being suspended. Talk about a rude awakening…It stinks to go to your website only to find a big banner going across it reading something to the effect of “This account has been suspended…” with instructions to contact the host company.
This all happened on Wednesday, August 6. I remember it well because I found out about it right before I had to leave for my pre-admissions testing at the hospital. What timing, I tell ya.
At that time, the tech told me it might have been because I didn’t have the most recent version of WordPress installed. WordPress fixed some vulnerabilities in a later version I didn’t even realize was out there. I had trusted Fantastico to have the most current version, but they didn’t. Simple Scripts is much better about keeping scripts updated, I later learned. There were some other glaring issues which left my site vulnerable, too.
Did I figure all this out on my own? Heck no! I am accomplished in many areas, but web design and coding is not one of them. I’m a very proficient end user, but don’t ask me to dig in and do stuff in a site’s back end. I am one of the huddled masses who rely on others to help them with this stuff.
All I can say is thank God for William. He met me at the coffee shop near Howie’s office that afternoon and spent a couple of hours updating our WordPress installations and checking on other things. His wife Rebecca had a thick novel with her and spent the time reading and sipping on a decaf.
As soon as I called and spoke to them, Hostmonster e-mailed me a list of things to do in order to secure my site. From what William said, it is stuff most web hosts suggest, but some of the things aren’t really necessary anymore.
Flash forward to yesterday. I found myself with my site suspended again. Fortunately, by then I had transferred our e-mail service to Google Apps, so it was only the website affected…Only this site, actually. The hackers didn’t do anything to our other sites on our shared space.
Once again it was William to the rescue. I reached him on Google Chat yesterday afternoon and he took it from there. I don’t know what all he did, but he must have spoken to someone at my host because my site was back up a few hours later.
Still, neither he nor I knew whether the hacker had left some kind of back door access to my site. William suggested I backup my SQL databases and my entire website, then have my host wipe it out so I could reinstall everything cleanly. It is the only way we’d know there weren’t any lingering issues.
So, with some gentle prodding from my friend, I exported my SQL databases last night and downloaded our entire webspace. Today, I asked tech support to wipe it clean.
Well, they wiped out everything. I went back and logged into the control panel only to find everything was cleared back to the point where nothing was left but my admin name and password. I knew the MX entries, subdomains, user accounts and such would have to be recreated, and that wasn’t so big a deal because I knew how to do those things.
My biggest problem was getting the SQL databases back up to my site. I tried importing them using phpMyAdmin, but I kept getting errors. I knew I had to get them back online before installing WordPress again, but only because I had gone to Simple Scripts and tried to install WordPress, only to have it ask me what database to associate with the installation.
Is this boring? I went through it and even I think it’s boring. Sigh.
To make a long story short, William helped me yet again by having me e-mail him my SQL files then doing some crazy magic in phpMyAdmin and getting them where they needed to be. He also reinstalled WordPress.
Whew!
The only plugin we are using for now is the Akismet comment spam filter. Since we really don’t know how the hacker gained access to the site, it’s best to start with a pretty clean slate and then add other plugins back in slowly and monitor what happens.
I tell ya, this stuff about gives me panic attacks. It is such an awful feeling of violation when someone messes with your site. Yuck. And to be someone who doesn’t know about all this php stuff and how to even find where the stuff on that list is, let alone fix it…Well, it sucks. I just hope this stuff is shored up and we’re good to go.
I really need to learn about this stuff, but I know it’s will have to be in the form of a class I attend. I know myself well enough to see that self-study or even an online class won’t work for me. I need the structure that a classroom setting provides, with the ability to as questions and learn by example. I should check into auditing some classes at the local technical college.
Okay, kids, I’m exhausted and sore. My shoulder’s not up to this much computer time and I’ve been working on website-related stuff since about 8pm. I’m going to bed!
Googly eyes gardener
As both a gardener and a fan of Christopher Walken, this Saturday Night Live skit makes me laugh. Though it was pretty obvious during the whole episode that he was reading from teleprompters, it’s still pretty funny.
“Ferns don’t have pricklers like cactuses, but what if they all ganged up on you, tried to choke you, in your sleep…”
*Snicker*
The whole idea is so ridiculous…Plants attacking us? Why would anyone think that?
Then again, I don’t grow any indoor ferns, so maybe I shouldn’t laugh. It could happen.
Bada bing bada BOOM
Wednesday night found us listening to the snaps and booms of firecrackers in our neighborhood. Around 11:00pm, we heard a succession of loud booms. We assumed someone had put some big firecrackers in a trash can, for these explosions had that kind of muffled sound. Seconds later, however, our power flickered and went off. It came back on for a few seconds, then all was dark again. Finally, it flickered back on, but we observed the other side of our street was still shrouded in darkness.
One of our pets, an Australian red claw crayfish (Cherax quadricarinatus), requires special attention in the case of power outtages; they can’t survive in a tank of unaerated, still water. They can breathe air and require their water to be oxygenated if they can’t climb out of it; the water’s surface area has to be disturbed by air bubbles or a filter’s flow. If a tank loses aeration, the crayfish must be removed from the tank, put in shallow water deep enough to keep the gills wet, but shallow enough it can raise their heads out it.
So, assuming the power situation was tenuous, I caught her (no easy feat - thank goodness I have a net) and put her in a Tupperware pitcher with just a little bit of water. It’s a good thing I did this, for the power did go off again. She suffered a 3 foot fall when she wriggled out of the net before I could grab her and get her in the pitcher. Other than losing a few small legs, she’s in good shape now, thank goodness.
Now, back to the story. Flash forward to 4:30am Thursday morning. We were awakened by the raucous sound of chainsaws and the rumble of chipper/shredder machines, courtesy of Asplundh Tree Expert Company. Nice. I’d been up until about 1:30am reading in bed, so this was an especially rude awakening for me. At about 5:30am, Howie and I gave up on trying to sleep and just got up.
It seems the tree branches in our neighborhood caused the transformers to blow. Hmmm, ya think? My neighbor Mandi tried a few months ago to get AEP to trim the branches along her property; they were resting on the lines and causing them to spark. She was told they were not trimming “pole to pole” this year. Evidently, they’d rather wait until the trees are so bad they cause a whole section of town to lose power, then send out crews to trim all the branches.
Please note that I am not disgruntled with Asplundh, but with AEP.
Before I got up, I used my Dash to send my next-door neighbor Mandi the following e-mail. It was tongue in cheek, a feeble attempt to make lemonade from the morning’s lemon crop:
Good morning, neighbor! This comes to you hot off the presses despite the fact that our power is still out. Thank goodness for wireless phones.
Please forgive any grammatical or typographical errors; I am writing this on my phone and am sleep-deprived. I wonder why…
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Fellow naturalists MO and KB had an unexpected opportunity to witness a flock of reclusive chainsawed AEP boobies early Thursday morning. The boobies’ enthusiastic cries echoed through the trees in a bizarre duet that drowned out native birdsong and set teeth on edge, yet afforded the friends a rare glimpse into boobie behavior.
When present, boobies play an active role in suburban forest ecology, thinning tree branches and keeping them from damaging high voltage power lines.
Despite MO’s persistent efforts to lure them to the region with the promise of a veritable feast of forestation, the boobies are reluctant visitors, an extremely rare sight. Formerly suspected extinct, their unexpected appearance heralds what MO and KB hope is the boobies’ return to the tree-clogged region of south Newark.
When asked if their return made the pre-dawn wake-up call worth it, KB rubbed her reddened eyes and replied, “I’ll have to think about that one.”
– Sent from my phone. –
Again, it’s not the Asplundh guys who are the boobies — it’s the people at AEP who let things go for so long. Asplundh just did their job, which woke us up.
It was interesting to watch them work and to talk to the guys who were waiting on the sidelines before doing their tasks. And I really wished I could go up in one of those cherry pickers and get pictures of the house and yard from 70′ in the air! I have many photos of the tree crews at Flickr.
One of the guys told me he’s worked for the company seven years and the lines behind our houses are the worst he’s seen anywhere. He also said they’ve not trimmed our neighborhood’s branches during that time (that I knew - we’ve lived here nine years this month). Thanks again, AEP!
It’s AEP’s policy to leave branches and logs behind when trees are removed due to weather emergencies. So, my neighbors have large piles of brush in their yards, piles the must dispose of or pay someone else to dispose of. Fortunately for us, the branches they took from our trees were left on the school property behind our lot.
Mandi and the neighbors on the other side of us are having the crew come back and remove the trees which the crews said are likely to cause future issues. Now’s the time since this will be done at no charge to the homeowners. They’ll leave the unchippable branches and logs, but disposing of those is minimal compared to the cost of having those trees taken down by a tree company.
We may have a large chokecherry tree taken out if AEP will do it along with the others. Additionally, Mandi’s having one of the guys who does tree work on the side come out and take down a few trees in her yard. I hate seeing big old trees taken down, but I can understand why she’s doing it; they’re messy trees that drop a lot of limbs, plus are old and on the decline. She’ll be able to use the greenhouse behind the house, too, since it will finally see sunlight again after who knows how many years in the shade.
Our huge old sycamore isn’t being touched, nor are our two large firs. We’ll still benefit from their shade on these hot summer days and enjoy the sycamore’s mottled white bark glow in the gold light just before sunset. I do, however, hope to have the tree guy trim a few of the branches back on the tree row bordering our property in front if we can swing it. The shade they cast is just enough that many of the sun-loving plants in our front yard grow sort of sideways, reaching for the light. I call the plants in those beds by their botanical names, followed by horizontalis.
A special note to Jen from work: Aren’t you happy I not only told dozens of customers about the chainsaw serenade at work Thursday afternoon, but now written about the transformers? I’ve even posted pictures! Now you’ll not only want to jam pencils in your ears, but your eyes as well!
Sharps
No, not Miller Beer’s Sharp’s non-alcoholic “beer” beverage. Sharps as in biohazard sharps. Anyone who’s worked in a hospital or other medical facility is well aware of these disposal receptacles.
What’s odd is, I took this picture in the public restroom at our local public library. I know it’s probably there as a courtesy to diabetics who must give themselves insulin injections. Still, why here? Hopefully it’s not a response to crackheads leaving syringes around or something like that. I wonder who maintains it and is responsible for emptying it. How and where do they dispose of its contents?
Am I the only one who finds it odd to see a biohazard sharps container at the library?
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