Life Lately: Markets, Clients, Reptiles, Cute Critters, Body Care Products, Herbs!

It's time to learn how to do as much as possible in as little time as possible because things are crazy busy around here and need to get crazier! I'm grateful despite some dizzyingly stressful of busy days, I get to wake up and do what I love every single day and basically make my own schedule: that, along with doing creative work that helps people, makes it all worth it!

We've been doing every market we can for Body & Soul. I don't know how people are finding us because I've done zero marketing for it, but we keep getting invites! We've been invited to sell at a school market this Friday so I only have a few days to formulate some teacher-friendly stuff and make some cute custom signs.

Custom order photo before some centering and brightening, we have a baby line in production and some custom baskets were requested. They got rave reviews and it was fun to bust out our crafting chops! I miss crafting stuff, gotta make time for it!

The sales are going well and we can't keep up with custom orders, now it's time for us to ramp-up production so we can get into stores. If you need custom body care product formulations let me know, we can literally make anything you can think of: massage products, pain relief, herbal pills, tea, lotion, bath bombs, salves, cleaners, soaps, shampoos, balms, ointments, etc - all clinically formulated to be extremely healing. One thing we want to do more than anything is formulate custom products for other brands/stores.

One of our favorite markets, Earth Day at the Jacksonville Landing, had gorgeous reptiles to behold.

AJ hates them (this specimen in particular, he's still joking about the "unholy beast" weeks later) but I adore reptiles. I don't know how they squeezed this guy into a shirt. He was roaming around on Earth Day for people to see.

I'm also now a part of my friend Lia's non-profit organization, Giving Greens. I can't do as much of the leg work she's doing (and she's doing an AMAZING job) but I'll be helping with the gardening, the events I can attend, photos, marketing and the website. It's been a dream of mine to help start a non-profit and I stand behind the mission of making healthy eating assessable to all. I can't wait until we start opening more community gardens all around the city.

I'm still taking product-photos for clients. Above is an outtake, shooting clear and white against white can be hard to get right! Above is the Beginner Herbalist course I'm now teaching online via distance learning, it's fun to come up with the supplies and lesson plans. I'm still taking classes (they'll never end, aah!) and want to go back to college to finish my digital media degree but with my holistic classes it doesn't feel like the 'right time.' But there will never be a 'right time', just kick my ass and make me do it, reader. Tell me to suck it up and go back to school. :P The other problem is my "scanner" tendency to want to do everything it does NOT match up with traditional school's one-size-fits-all-you-only-stay-in-one-field-and-get-one-degree-dammit ways. (I'd love to go to school for nutrition or psychology too but it's not practical if you're not determined to make a career in those fields...)

This weekend, stressed with a brain next-to bursting with too much information I finally gave myself time to scrub this apartment! Things were scattered because SOMETHING had to give, so busy, but now everything's back in it's place. It's not perfect (despite two Kon Mari cleanses, I think a problem is that she didn't cover how to handle constant influx of stuff when you run a business in your home) but I've given up on that- even if I had to hastily throw stuff in boxes out of desperation and put those away, it's uncluttered and thus not stressing me to look at, that's what's important for now!

And just a couple of critter shots! Above is Lotus, whom I share an office with at the Herbalism studio I work at, and my white shadow Yuko that follows me everywhere begging for food!

BTW: I'm still bummed about my favorite artist's sudden passing. I've been enjoying the various tributes and enjoying his videos being snuck online while I can. A couple articles I really enjoyed lately include: these hilarious stories (all in his personal circle said he was super funny and a prankster) & even better collection of his best screams - he had the best in the business, hands-down.

How're things going in your world? 

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