For love of music and good deals

I love holiday pricing, especially since the internet lets me buy stuff without taking hours to shop around or fighting crowds at busy stores.

I also love Barnes & Noble’s Christmas membership deal: I got a free 2-month trial membership starting in late November, which gives me free express shipping with no minimum order. Mwe-he-he. I don’t want to sound like a B&N ad, but they got the losing end of that deal in my case; I have ordered several items one at a time, each of which cost less than $15, and on all (or on all but one) of which I managed to use a one-item coupon (25-40% off each item). …Well, maybe they got the losing end. I have to admit that I’m tempted to renew the membership.

The first few were Christmas gifts – a couple of books for my brothers and an album of Telemann for my mom. But I just got an email coupon (25% off) that was good this weekend and found a different coupon for the same deal on a cashback website. Three discs of classical piano, coming right up! I ordered a 2-disc set of Chopin preludes & nocturnes performed by Garrick Ohlsson and a disc of three Mozart sonatas (including the famous K.331, which I wrote about earlier) from pianist Murray Perahia. I considered getting an 11-disc set of Rubinstein performing Chopin (instead of the Ohlsson), but I’ll wait and see if B&N sends me a 30%- or 40%-off coupon in the next few weeks.

I may have also ordered a few guilty pleasures through Amazon (Jewel, Dido, Edwin McCain), plus Telemann’s Darmstadt Overtures (mmm) and yet another video game (Star Ocean III, though I don’t have II, so I’ll be jumping around the series).

Here’s Ohlsson playing Chopin’s Prelude in C sharp minor, Opus 45:

Oh yeah, and happy New Year!

My very favorite flower

This is my kind of grocery-shopping trip (courtesy today’s lunch trip to SFM):

2# pork sausage (half Polish, half beer brat);
2# red seedless grapes;
1/2# Co-jack cheese;
1/2# fresh-ground peanut butter (you know, those machines in-store that grind it in front of you? that.);
10 ears sweet corn on cob;
1 fresh pineapple (not cut);
1 green bell pepper;
1 cucumber;
1 onion;
1 ataulfa mango;
3 qts. soy milk;
1 box (25 bags) oolong tea.

Total?: $16.15.

Sunflower Market, I love you.

Saturday Zazzle Update

I’ve continued to work on adding clothing and accessories to my store at Zazzle, this week. Nineteen images from the Hubble Space Telescope are now available on a variety of shirts, tote bags, aprons, hats, and even doggie shirts. And many more are on the way.

So far in July I’ve sold a sheet of stickers and a print – not great, but July’s always a slow month, I think. Hopefully it picks up and proves me wrong, though!

Zazzle Update

In the past week at Zazzle, I’ve added a new product line, updated another, shined up the navigation pod, and made a couple of sales. Not terrible.

The newest line available at Les Étoiles is skateboards – they require a very high-resolution image, and fortunately, I have a few of those! I think they look pretty good, but I’m no skater, so I’m not the authority on these things.

I also added larger-sized posters / prints to the store, since a number of the images are large enough for bigger prints than were already available.

I’ve changed the navigation to a set of hand-coded links, so I have full control now over what goes in the navigation and what doesn’t, and while I was in the code, I changed the look a bit to clean it up, reorganize, and sprinkle a few serif fonts in there. Gotta love a good serif.

I also had two sales this week, a poster on Monday and a handful of keychains on Thursday. Nice! Keep it up, June, keep it up.

Weekly Zazzle Update

Over the past week, I’ve made a couple of small improvements and introduced a new product line at my Zazzle store, Les Étoiles.

First, after updating the layout of the shop, I noticed that the footer changed colors between a couple different versions of the page, in a way that made the border look quite silly in one. I fixed that, and the border’s sitting pretty.

Second, there’s a ‘promo bar’ at the top of the page that Zazzle uses when they have a sitewide sale going. The bar is an ugly yellow color, except on my storefront, where I have fixed it to be black like the page background, so the promo’s still noticeable but the bar is no longer an eyesore. I still have to fix this on other pages in my store – I didn’t realize they used a different bit of CSS to do the other pages. It’ll get there.

Finally, I took a little break from business cards to start making bookmarks. They each have a quotation on them (written by me – but customizable so people can change it to a personal fav if they want), and they’re actually using the “skinny business card” product type, so Zazzle counts them as business cards for promos and stuff, and they’re a sweet little 1×3″.

Also, Zazzle is in fact running a sale this weekend, for Memorial Day — and it’s a pretty good one. Posters are 50% off, business cards (including my new bookmarks) are 40% off, and 20% off postage with the coupon code MEMORIALSALE. It’s only good through Tuesday, so it’s worth checking out soon. I’m thinking of buying some stuff, myself.