Ach Ach Liebling received two early Valentines this week: some sweet blog love on Purple Pink & Orange, and a shout-out in this Etsy Storque article about gifts that pay homage to Darwin (hint: scroll down to #7).

My friend Alix was in town this weekend, which means I had a busy weekend full of good eats and a Saturday-night funsplotion of beer, board games and more beer culminating in rowdy charades.

Sometime after dropping kitty off for an emergency vet visit on Saturday (she’s ok!) and before the boozy geekfest of Saturday night, I managed to squeeze in a mini photo-shoot of my jewelry with Alix, a talented professional photographer, Ben, another shutterbug friend with mad skillz, and Tamara, my traffic-stopping best friend and college roommate of yore.  I say “mini” because we had, like, 20 minutes to squeeze in as many shots as possible before the sunlight was completely gone, and because Tamara and I did not know what we doing and showed up unprepared (costumes? props? huh?).  Nevertheless, Alix and Ben took buttloads of beautiful photographs.  Thanks, guys!  I love my talented friends.

I’ll be working on editing the photos and adding them to the website and Etsy store (as well as putting together a long-overdue wholesale catalog).  Here’s a teaser of things to come and you can also more pictures on my Flickr.

One of my resolutions: to not be quite so remiss when it comes to blog postings.  Maybe beginning this in the busy autumn season was not, in hindsight, the wisest plan; I never really got a pattern down– especially inexcusable for a onetime English major who aspired to write as her grown-up occupation.  Now, I avoid the computer like the plague– not because I dislike writing but because I loose myself in metalworking.  I have to be dragged away from my workbench, physically.

Another resolution: better bookkeeping habits.  This is, of course, a resolution I make every January, as I hunker down with tax forms and heaping piles of unsorted receipts.  A positive side-effect of resolution #2 is that spending that much more time in front of the computer makes it all the more likely I’ll stick to resolution #1 by way of procrastination.  Like right now, for instance.

I’m a big fan of January– especially now that I live someplace where New Year’s Day was a balmy fifty-two degrees and sunny (I recall caring for it a lot less in the bitter cold of Manhattan).  I like what it symbolizes: regeneration, redemption, hope.  For me, it’s not so much the self-improvement resolutions though that mark this time, though; after all, I constantly feel pressure from society and in the form of my own goals and expectations for myself to improve and be better.

At the New Year’s Party Steve and I threw, Erin, a friend, said, “I like ending things,” meaning, years.  I like it, too.  I like the neatness of things having ends and beginnings, like novels or symphonies or school years.  Novels, though, have their ends built in; the endings make sense and you can feel them begin to approach.  Years end so abruptly.  I’m always in the middle of things.  I’m always trying to get more done and to do it better.  To set goals and accomplish them, and of course I never accomplish the really big goals, so I am always breaking them down into smaller and smaller pieces so I can reach hundreds of smaller milestones without ever completing a goal.  Running a small business exacerbates the anxiety of unfinished business: there is always something to do– an order to be filled, an item to be photographed, a store to be called, taxes to be filed, an inquiry to be returned– I’m never, ever done.

What I like about the New Year is that it always arrives so abruptly.  The calendar is completely indifferent to my goals and milestones, all the million and one accomplishments I am supposed to have fulfilled by now.  The year ends when it ends, whether my character has progressed or not.  New Year’s is unforgiving.

It’s good that once a year I have to confront all the tasks I failed to get done, the changes I didn’t make, the people I never called, the goals I fell short of, the goals I never set.  Otherwise, I’m pretty sure I could delude myself into thinking I was on course to accomplish everything next week, forever.  This is a good time to stock not just of what I want to improve but of what I want.  What do I value?  What is important to me?

Toward the end of our New Year’s Eve party, after a champion’s game of Cranium (I still prefer charades), Sarah suggested we go around the room and share a resolution, which sounds a little old-fashioned and corny, and maybe is a little old-fashioned and corny, but after six hours of drinking and eating and with a roomful of friends, is, it turns out, really incredibly nice.  People’s answers ran the gamut from the admirable (”be more generous with strangers”) to the achievable (”try two new group exercise classes”) to the unenviable (”stop smoking”) to the inexplicable (”wear more tweed”) and quite a few having to do with the various scholarly pursuits of my genius friends.

My resolution was and is to take a class on bookkeeping so I can learn how to better run the business-side of my business.  And I’m planning it on it; I have it all mapped out on my calendar.  But that’s not very interesting and as it falls into the self-improvement category, I’m amending it here.  My resolution is to spend time reflecting on and thinking critically about my business.  My resolution is to think about not just what I want from my business but also what I want it to do and to be.  What do I value?  What is important to me?

As I reflect on these topics, I’ll also write on these topics, here in this blog in 2009, along with more mundane things and anything else I feel like.