Nights in South of Rodanthe

Part One:

I’m a bad blogger. I dropped the ball. I didn’t post at all last week while on vacation.

I know. I know. Now, most people would be like, “Why would you?” Well, the answer is clear, at least to my wife, my laptop is surgically attached to my lap. While I am sure it is doing irreparable damage to my reproductive organs, it also wouldn’t do well in salt water, so I detached it for a week. That’s not to say I was completely offline. I checked up on emails, pondered a couple of shirt designs and basically farmed my virtual farm on Facebook, which seems to have disappeared, suddenly. Perhaps a virtual twister has swept it off to a virtual Oz, complete with virtual flying monkeys. Last I heard, though, it’s back, bringing peace and tranquility back to the masses.

Oh, am I rambling? Do you want to know all about my trip? Well, I just happened to have my pictures here, go figure. Want to see the home movies? OK, kidding. I would like to give you a boring rundown of the entire week. If anything, it serves as a how to manual if not a “What not to do.” I have had some bad luck with the Outer Banks before and going back there is always an adventure. So, over the course of the week, I’ll give you a pseudo journal of notes I kept in order to share when I got home. Let’s start with the prep and work our way from there.

Day -7
I have a lot to do before leaving next Saturday. First off, I need to cancel the other existing car rental. I had originally gone with Company A and secured a van to become the “Family Truckster.” After talking with the guy who sold us our normal FT I was persuaded to use Company B because Company A would screw up the rental, overcharge us, and generally make our lives a living hell…according to him. I had made the reservation with Company B and then had reservations…sorry, there’s laughter in my head. Anyway, I can’t in good conscience go with a company that has an employee playing Madden 09 in the lobby while I’m trying to do business. Also, because my wife is a bit of an obsessive compulsive, I had to keep checking to make sure I had the right vehicle. I needed something big enough for 7 passengers. There’s only five of us going but we need room for all our stuff and our daughter’s entire world.

Company B tried to stick us with an SUV and yet I explained that I already had a Mini Van reserved somewhere else at the same price….dance puppet. Once I reiterated my requirements I was quoted a higher price. The girl in clubbing attire behind the counter informed me that SUVs are down in price now and Mini Vans are up. I didn’t know there was a season for Mini Vans. I told her hold the reservation and I’ll work something out…which is code for, “You’re my back up plan for last call. If I can’t find a better girl to go home with, you’ll still be available.” I promptly left and went a mile down the road to Company A and reinstated my reservation. I accepted the price hike but realized that the roles had been reversed in our Car Salesman’s Tale of Two Car Rental Companies. I now had two reservations, one for either a Dodge Grand Caravan or a Toyota Sienna.

With this all said and done, it was time to give Miss Thang at Company B her walking papers. Instead of dealing with them in person, I took the coward way out and cancelled my reservation online. It was a good thing, too. The rental was for a Ford Taurus. I didn’t know they made a Mini Van in the Taurus model.

Car – Check

Day -6
The rains have been heavy and so are the hearts of the men….signed G Washington….It has been raining an unusual amount here and the yard needs to be cut before we leave. I just don’t know when I will have the time. I have to help clean the house….boo hiss… and update the iPod for the road trip. Cutting the grass would take less time. I haven’t updated my iPod in over a year. I haven’t even listened to it in the car. Too much work. I’ve given up music for NPR. All Things Considered, Car Talk, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, and Fresh Air are on my playlist now. Though, I wouldn’t be too shy to plug the iPod back in during pledge week, that sucks.

Memorial Day is just ahead and Sci-Fi is running a Land of the Lost marathon. This takes precedence over everything. Imagine, 21 and a half hours of rubber suited monsters, Harryhausen style claymation dinosaurs, and really cheesy acting complete in 70’s fashion. Childhood regression at its finest. I only hope the DVR doesn’t shit the bed.

Day -5
My DVR shit the bed. While that gets sorted out, I guess I’ll help clean the house. Oh and there’s shopping at the store. Oh joy.

Day -4
Ok, the yard is finally cut. My wife opted to help get things moving as the grass was so high and wet, the bagger mower would have taken another three days to use as the only source of mowing. The front yard wasn’t that bad and didn’t need bagged or even raked. The house still needs a sprucing up one more time as four cats have a steady hand in furring up the place.

Day -3
One more call to Company A per my wife confirms I will either have a Grand Caravan or a Sienna. All is well. The iPod is still updating….or I’m stuck on an error and forgot to hit OK.

Day -2
Welcome to Day -2. It’s Thursday to all you non technical people. I have the iPod updated, a few shirt designs under my belt and a my crop rotation on Farm Town is optimal for harvesting when I have a moment to crack open the laptop during the trip. I know my wife is cursing the fact that we will have Wi-Fi at the beach house but I told her it would be essential for checking on times and menus for dinner locations since everything in the OBX seems to close at 9pm. I learned that on my first trip to the dreaded Post Apocalyptic Pool Hall in the Outer Banks. I wonder if that place is still there. If it is, that dead thing on top of the cigarette machine near the actual Poll Hall of the Post Apocalypse is probably still there.

Before we leave, I have to de-fur the couches and clean up all my junk. My wife came up with an ingenious and time saving way to de-fur the couches. I’m used to applying this rubber pet brush to the couches to collect the fur then suck it up with the hose from our canister vac. My wife tried the Oreck, applied directly to the cushions and it works just as well. I don’t suffer from allergy attacks and I’m done in half the time.

Day -1
It’s Friday and the first official day of my vacation. I took off work to get the Family Truckster, pack said Truckster, and get a nap before driving 12 hours at 1 AM. Guess which task I’m not going to get done. You got it. Fortunately, I have an ample supply of Red Bull and Stay Awake at the ready.

I went with my Father in Law to pick up the FT. Dodge Grand Caravan, baby! I was actually pretty stoked about this van. I used to drive one for the hotel I worked at and really liked it. There was no Captain’s Chairs in the second row, but the stow and go feature would be put to good use in packing the sucker. I’m about to use every available cubic foot of space in this beast and have room for four adults and one toddler in a car seat. Sliding passenger doors on both side will be great for getting the baby in and out and with one touch open and close from the key chain, I can get that thing open before we get out the door.

On the way back, I stopped at the In Laws to pack up their stuff. Three suitcases, a CPAP bag, shoulder bag, and three pillows later, I’m at the homestead for our luggage. We added two suitcases, a back pack, CPAP bag, kids sand toys, house toys, blankets for the beach, DVD player, lap top bag, two shopping bags for food, a Coleman cooler in the back and a smaller shoulder strap cooler for the trip, clothes basket, and three more pillows. We are loaded. Unfortunately, the nap is going to be scrubbed.

Day 1
It’s now 1 AM and we are off to pick up my In Laws for the trip. We arrived by 1:15 and expected to be on the Turnpike by 1:30 to meet my wife’s sister at another exit by 2 AM. We made it almost a mile before turning around. My Father in Law forgot something. By 1:45 we were off and running. No turning back now. We passed the point of no return, the on ramp to the PA Turnpike, and kept on moving through the night. We shut off the iPod after three songs…go figure.

CafePress Premium Store Updates

It has been an exhausting week. First off, today is the day of Mongo’s birth…..which I’ve been trying to fly under the radar with but still people find out and wish me a Happy Birthday. Not that I mind, but I try not to be too outgoing on this day because I may not be in a good mood and why dash someone’s well wishes with my wishy washy well being?

That being said, my wife thinks that I am obsessed with the new store. Well, it’s hard to get up and running, especially during a trial period, so that you can maximize any selling opportunities before they start charging you for your premium store.

On a positive note, I sold another shirt. This little number was inspired by those Spencer Gifts tees with 13 different pictures depicting an act or emotion of the character like Anger, Hunger, Happy, etc. Mix that with the Zombie theme and you basically get the same picture for each mood.

I had to include ennui as it is just too funny to think of a zombie that way.

Now, I added that design on March 3rd and within 2 days, I sold one. Again, I don’t make that much off of each shirt, but it helps boost the visibility of the design early on and will maybe generate more sales. It came from the “Marketplace” which means someone searched a keyword that led them to my shirt, rather than they stumbled into my store and bought something off the rack, as it were.

In that regard, I’ve done some rework on the store, finally. I used the basic template and structure to get things up and running, but as I add designs and products for those designs, I find myself having a hard time managing all these products in one place. Now, being in the job I currently am, I am very conscious towards scrolling and clicks to the center of a tootsie pop. If someone searches CafePress for keywords that lead to my items, so be it, but that is only half the battle. You might also get people wandering into your store and the further they are from a selection means the further you are from a sale. If you have some good marketing skills you can drive customers into your store from outside CafePress’ website. In that case, the better your organization is, the better you can fight a two front battle.

When I first opened the store, I wasn’t thinking ahead. Oh, I’ll throw up a couple of designs and add some shirts and that’s it. But what I found was that you need to constantly be thinking and working ideas to see which produces results. If you have a niche store, selling unique designs, you probably don’t have to do as much work. Simply add a new design every so often, throw it on some products and wait. But, if your brain is constantly going, like mine, you want to try and capture everything. Hey, I just thought of a funny design, I need to go work on that. Soon, you have 15 designs. Oooh, I want that to be in different colors for the dark shirts. Take those 15 designs and multiply by that by how many colors you want to display.

Here’s a prime example. I have a store section called, “Insert Coin.” This is basically where I’ve put all my designs that are based on or inspired by video games. Being a child of the Atari Age, I thought it would be cool to capture some of those pop culture kernels of cheesy goodness and “make some shirt.” I had three ideas which I thought were clever. So far, I’ve only gotten to one. The other two are going to be awhile, because my first design spawned three more related designs and three colors for each.

Based off the old Adventure game, I put the dragons on individual shirts. Clean and simple recreations drawn on a transparent background should be easy. Let’s face it, the Atari was not that advanced, recreating a blocky dragon that looks like a duck is easy. However, there are three distinct dragons in the game, Yellow – Yorgle, Green – Grindle, and Red- Rhindle. Now, I have three colored designs on 15 or so shirts. Then, the other two designs I had for the dragons had to be produced the same way. Now, my section was very crowded with all these dragon shirts and my poor Keytar Hero shirts were lost in the shuffle. Rearranging the store to stagger the designs on each style shirt style caused any customer to have to scroll through a lot of dragons to find a Keytar Hero shirt that they may want.

Rhindle, the meanest of all three dragons.

This is where my work experience comes in to play. If I break up the section into designs. I can then have the front of the Insert Coin section showcase the individual design. If they click on that design, they can go to a section of those products and instead of scrolling through multiple designs, now they are scrolling through multiple products with the same design. In essence, I’ve created a basic shop all over again and imported it into a premium hierarchy. Remember, in your basic shops, you are allowed one design per product but multiple products per one design. I can’t believe I didn’t see this concept sooner. If I were to create different basic shops, like I used to, I would follow the same pattern. So, if I follow that model, managing my products will be a lot easier.

Now, whenever I come up with an idea for a shirt, I build the section, first. Add a design to the section and then import all of the shirt styles from another section. This keeps me from having to go through and choose each one the list. Then, I can now check all and change the name, description, and image on the shirts in bulk. With each section devoted to a design instead of a theme, this frees me from having to scroll down through 30 or so shirts checking which ones I want to change. It also makes it easier to manage the markups and color choices. Some designs don't work well on dark shirts, so I have to go back and choose those to change the image to an inverted color scheme so that they'll show up. This came into play with my Wii-knee shirts. Apparently, there is a report that Wii related injuries have been cropping up involving gamers' knees. How could I resist?

The drawn outline shows up OK on a white t-shirt.


But it would have been lost on a dark shirt, so an inverted image is used.


Just in case, I also included a design with just the phrase.

That's all for now. I still have many designs to try and get into the store, but I am just about out of trial time, so the quicker the better. Now, I'm paying $5.00 a month and as of today, I have about three months paid up with sales. Hopefully, soon, a profit will be made. More later.

CafePress Premium Shop Owner Wees and Woes

I’ve been selling or have been trying to sell shirts and other novelty items on CafePress since 2006. In the beginning I had a couple of ideas for some shirts based on the Mongo image I use on my blog. They were a parody of the “got milk?” ads and asked people to embrace their inner “Mongo.” You know, the one who gets angry when the copier jams or knocks over three bottles reaching for one on the table. That guy, the bull in the china shop.... have you read my blog? Ever seen the graphic at the top of the page? Go ahead, I'll wait. OK.

I opened up a basic shop, uploaded my images, and sat back and waited for the money to roll in to my account. Yeah, it didn’t happen. Still, I was hopeful. I thought I tagged my images correctly but when I did a search my items were buried three or four pages deep into the results. So, I did some tweaking and some research on how to effectively tag images. Then other ideas started flooding my brain. I expanded and opened up another basic shop that dealt with Pop Culture parody items. Because the basic shop allows you to have one type of item per design, it became necessary to open up multiple shops to have a basic t-shirt with different graphics on them. It became a little tedious, but I wasn’t selling anything yet, so I couldn’t justify opening up a premium shop which would allow me different sections and multiple designs for the same style of shirt at a price. In all, I opened up three stores and in all, I sold zero product.

I kind of left the shops up and running and used my account to make calendars for my family at the base price. Everything else just sat and waited for someone to stop by and pay for a shirt $3.00 over base price. The markup is where shop keepers make their money. CafePress charges a flat rate to the customer, not the shopkeeper, and then you decide how much of a markup your design is worth. You keep the markup, CafePress keeps the base price. That, coupled with a huge amount of premium customers adds up to money in their pocket.

Lately, I decided to see if it would be worth taking the risk and paying $5.00 a month to aggregate all of my ideas into one shop. CafePress is offering a 15 day trial and if you don't like it, you can cancel it. However, be warned, if you've operated a few basic shops up until now, you may not want to upgrade. Once you go Premium, you can't revert back to basic. You would have to start all over again, so it might be more beneficial to keep your basic shops separate and open a brand new Premium shop and import your items over from your basic ones.

I kept the theme of my own personal logo, “Mongo Angry! Mongo Smash!” and added sections to cover various themes. Some of the features make owning a premium shop more beneficial. I have the ability to add various designs to the same style of shirt, which is nice. I also have the ability to modify and personalize my site with my HTML knowledge. This is going to require some time but I’ll eventually get it done.

So, after four days, how is it going? I’ve made three dollars off of a pin I created.

It was an oddball thing I thought of when I heard that people actually recognize Pi Day as March 14th, which is three days before St. Patrick’s day, and people own pins that say "Kiss me, I'm Irish." Well, you get the idea.

With that sale and a few other sales I didn’t know I had, I have managed to make about $15.00 total. This will keep the light on in my shop for three months after my initial trial ends. Now, I will have to sell about nine more items to pay for the rest of the year, and anything on top of that is profit. But is it worth it? If I can afford to spend $5.00 a month, then yeah, it’s worth it. But you have to think in certain terms.

First, while CafePress is a very nice and affordable site for a shopkeeper, it’s not exactly the same for a consumer. You are paying a lot of money for a shirt designed by an amateur. Granted, there are some talented artists out there among the sea of mediocre shirts. I do not claim to be an artist or designer, I just have a broad and insane sense of humor. My ideas are based on absurd situations or parodies of pop culture ideas. I also have to be vigilant enough to stay ahead of the current trends or someone will have beaten me to the punch. I made a little parody design for a Helicopter Tour outfit based on a popular television show. If you search “LOST” on the main site, you’ll get 11,200 results for designs on a quarter of a million products. Everything from the numbers to symbols from the stations to even character specific tees. Just for the sake of argument, my design is on page...well, I gave up after the first 500 results. Now, if I search the word “Lapidus”, you get one result and it’s my design. That’s not that great. I may have to go back and retag my image. That’s the trick. You have to think like a consumer. What kind of shirt are they looking for? Will they get it? Are your designs or store properly tagged to rank high enough in the search results? Will people be willing to go to page two or three to find your little idea on a tee?

Secondly, and more importantly, can you accept a couple of dollars off of a sale? I tried to be really fair on my prices. I have a flat rate which just makes it easier to manage. However, the base price of a blank shirt is comparable to one in the store, if not more expensive and it has an actual graphic on it. Blogs and forums will tell you to not sell yourself short, but you have to be cognizant of a struggling economy and your competition. Even the most die hard t-shirt, clothes horse is hard up for cash these days. People may not be willing to pay $20.00 for a goofy shirt that looks like a knock off of a real one. If you are trying to capture the mood of the customer for any given topic in entertainment or news, you will compete with tons of other shopkeepers for customers. Now, If you can really design well and have good marketing sense, you may be able to create a niche for yourself in unique shirts and other products. If you’re a pop culture schmo like me, you’re fighting an uphill battle with two strikes against you. You’re only going to make serious money in volume sales. Forget about trying to make it all on one shirt. Create a product that you can move repeatedly, and you’ll see the benefits.

Now, onto my biggest pet peeve. Every so often, you can get nailed by the Content Usage police. Imagine you are in the shower or some other place where you do your best mental work and an idea hits you that is so clever and funny…to you…that you spend an entire weekend tweaking a design to make it look just right. You upload you design, choose your shirt styles and then sit back and wait for the sales to roll on into your pocket. You go to bed after a long day of squinting at your pain program of choice, only to wake up to an email stating that your wonderful and fantastic image has been put into pending status. It pisses you right off it does.

I mentioned in a previous post how I had a design which was tagged...in violation of content usage policy… That’s lawyer speak for, “You are not allowed that design.” I ended up redoing it, which made it look less professional but it’s still live on the site. It sucks, but I guess I really didn’t make my first design unique enough to pass the censors. However, the second design that came into question deserved a reprieve. I spent a hell of a lot of time trying to design this little parody shirt. I found a font called Nightmare Hero which gave me that Heavy Metal Feel. I felt really proud of my Keytar Hero shirt and they nailed me for it!

Further review of Cafepress’ site revealed a few shirts called Cowbell Hero which was a clever take on the whole idea. If I hadn’t seen it on Chuck, recently, I would have hoped my brain would have been able to come up with it. Alas, I did not and I won’t touch it since there is another shirt with the same logo. I just don’t have another weekend in which I can blow on a design. The ones on CafePress are a bit sloppy but similar font style, which prompted me to cry “Shenanigans” to the Content Usage Police. I informed them that I did download a free font and that there were other shirts with similar designs. They backed off and reinstated my image. Now, whether the Cowbell Hero shirts were spawned after the episode of Chuck, where the shirt was visible in a closet, or solely inspired by the hilarious Christopher Walken sketch seen on Saturday Night Live, years ago, is one of the chicken and egg people. My only concern was that if I was going down, so was everyone else. I might still do a redesign and offer it as an alternative on the chance that they may come back and say that I am infringing somewhere. This one is going to be a more 80’s style design with bright neon colors and rounded font style instead of the black and white Heavy Metal font. Who knows, it might be a bigger seller.

These are the things you deal with when you opt for a premium shop. It takes a lot of time to do the work. I spent a good hour rearranging my store so that I could group my shirts by style and then design. You can choose one or multiple items and then move them up or down by clicking on arrows on the side of the page. I added products in bulk and then had to go back and change them by grouping. You have to check each item and then choose from a drop down like “Add/Change Image”, “Change Name”, “Change Description”, "Change Markup", etc. You can only change one attribute at a time and then you have to go back and recheck each product and choose another attribute to change. Shoot me now. However, I did find a shortcut. If I created one product, say a white t-shirt, with a design I want and then realized that I could probably use a bunch of other shirts like a baseball jersey or golf shirt for the same design, I can cheat a bit when it comes to changing attributes. When you go through and check off each product to change, also check off the original item you created. This automatically populates the attribute from the original in the text field leaving you to just click “Apply Changes.” Nine out of ten times this worked successfully. If you have a lot of products in a store or section of store, it can be a tedious task to rearrange. I think they should do some work to update this feature letting you choose your items and then click and drag rather than click an up or down arrow repeatedly. Or they should change the interface all together to allow you a more dynamic feature utilizing AJAX widgets like iGoogle. I’m sure if those features become available I could get my work done more quickly. Still, I managed to get the store rearranged the way I want. Each row was a style of shirt and each column was a different graphic.

So, there you have it. I’m going to try and sprinkle in some more tips and stories from the world of a CafePress newbie from time to time. Hopefully, this will either give you inspiration to either venture out on your own or at least caution you against even starting. In any case, it will maybe drive some traffic to my store. I need to keep selling or it’s going to cut into my own t-shirt fund. Unfortunately, I may be my best customer.

Five Tips For Holiday Shopping

If you still haven’t finished your shopping for the Holidays then shame on you…and me for that matter. However, for the professional procrastinator, I thought I would offer five tips for shopping close to the Holidays. Why? T’is the season.

1. Take advantage of Free Shipping Day.
   Now, I know you might have missed out on this. I managed to sneak in under the wire. A lot of retailers recognize December 18th as “Free Shipping Day” as a way to entice shoppers to place their last minute orders online. This is recognized as the last day most can guarantee delivery by Christmas on standard shipping. Yule still have to pay for premium services if you wait until the 19th which is “Crap! I’m a Dumb Ass Day."
2. Look for deals and coupons before buying.
   At my office, we just received a gift basket from Wine Country Gift Baskets. These kinds of gift baskets are typical in an office setting and I pondered the idea about maybe getting them for people on my list. I went to the website and was faced with an onslaught of goodies for pretty good prices. However, I did take advantage of free shipping. Now, the moral of this story is that you can get pretty caught up in a new site that looks great. If you take your finger off the buy trigger for five seconds, you may find yourself additional savings. I went to Google and typed “Wine Country Gift Baskets Coupons” and let Google do the work for me. I managed to get an additional 5% off my order by obtaining a coupon code from one of the sites I was given in the search results. In previous years, I’ve managed to save an additional 5-10% on orders by opening up a card with the retailer and then close it after the balance is paid off. These are specialty items from sites that I would probably not look to again. “I call these One Offs."
3. Shop at odd hours
   I recently took a Saturday to do some Christmas Shopping and returned an item for credit. I spent 10 minutes in line at the return desk with a child who was becoming increasingly cranky. I managed to return that item and did nothing else. This was a Saturday at 2pm. Big mistake. Unfortunately, more and more people are shopping off peak hours creating a consistent flow of traffic in the stores. While, I dread shopping at Wal-Mart, I know that I can get in and out late at night. The only issue is the store is stocking shelves in this slow time and I have to travel out of my way to get around pallets that are blocking the isles. The move to online shopping is becoming a model of real store traffic. As conventions like “Free Shipping Day” and “Cyber Monday” become more widely accepted, traffic to websites can slow down your experience and cause crashes right when you least desire it. If you can stand to be in the stores among a sea of bargain hunters go ahead. Me, I’d rather not let my frustration with that shopper, who blocks the aisle and proceeds to stand there oblivious to anyone around them, carry over to the parking lot where I might overlook something like a car or pedestrian in my path.
4. Homemade Gift Baskets
   I know it seems trite, but there are some pretty cool ideas out there. I mentioned that Country Wine Gift Basket website and while I suggest using them, a more thoughtful idea might be to create your own. If you have a hard to shop for person on your list, a gift card is fine, but the idea of getting a gift card is becoming increasingly lazy, in my opinion. Not to mention, a lot of gift cards nowadays carry hidden caveats like expiration of funds, fees, and the threat of the store being out of business before they can be redeemed. Also, with different family members buying me gift cards, I end up getting competing store cards and have to split up orders between retailers. The homemade gift basket is cheaper and more thoughtful, because you’ve taken the time to put work into it.
   1. Shop at a store like Marshalls or TJ Maxx and buy cheap but pretty baskets
   
   
   2. Go to a craft store or discount store and get wrapping supplies like cellophane and shredded paper or hay or whatever they call that stuff.
   
   
   3. Get your themed items. If the recipient is a movie fan, get some microwave popcorn, their favorite candy bars, and perhaps a gift card for movie rentals or tickets to their local theater, and a couple of other items that are indicative of their tastes. For a classier looking basket, get higher end chocolates like Ghirardelli or other premium brands and real popping corn instead of microwave….if they have the means in which to pop it. My wife went to Target and found several packs of coffees from Jack Daniels and Frangelico, all in the dollar section near the front of the store. Add a couple of nice looking coffee mugs, premium chocolates, and maybe a gift card to Starbucks.
   
   Be creative. You’ll save some cash and give them a lot for the effort.
5. Give Yourself
   No, I don’t mean in terms of prostitution, I mean in terms of time. The economy is slumping, no one can afford high credit card payments. Now is the time to be in someone’s life. Take the time and help out. Maybe it’s something that they have either neglected or need assistance in doing like cleaning out the garage. Maybe it’s a home improvement project. A case of beer and a few days of work will increase the bond of your relationship….or completely destroy it in a drunken fight with power tools…who knows. Drink responsibly.
   
   Another example is my parents. They worst to buy for because they say they don’t need anything but their family. They always want a list from us but they never give us one in return. We fumble around the stores and get them gift cards, but they just pile up. We rack our brains to buy them gadgets and other items they might want and they just collect dust. But, as they get on in years, there are numerous projects around their house that appear incomplete or not even started. Hint around to what’s going on in someone’s life and find some time to help them. Take them to the store that they love but hate to drive to. Offer them a night away from the house at their favorite restaurant and pick up the tab. These are things you don’t have to try and buy at the last minute and there is no shipping dates to adhere by. This is a gift that can be redeemed throughout the coming year, especially if it is a nice weather project.

Whatever you finally decide to do with your holiday shopping, just remember to be mindful of your wallet and your identity. These are tough times and as much as we want to be generous with our loved ones, they will understand. Sometimes the best gifts are the ones that you can’t buy in a store or online. Sometimes, the littlest gift is something that they would never buy themselves but only mentioned in passing. Gift giving is 25% monetary, 25% presentation, and 50% thought. Don’t get caught up in the spirit of commercialism. Alternatively, a poor gift is something you think they need….a great gift is something you know they want. When in doubt, money always works, but if you agree to a budget or a set limit….it’s rather unimpressive.

Be safe and be well.