Spring Is Vinylly Here!

It’s that time of year again.  Flowers are springing up; trees are in bloom; the sun is shining; students are losing focus.  You know which season I’m talking about.  That’s right, it’s Gift Giving Season!  For all of you out there who love to procrastinate (myself included) remember that Mother’s Day is rapidly approaching.  So let’s save all the last-minute-frantically-running-around-the-department-stores-looking-for-gifts stress.  Don’t act like you have never been there, we all have.  But spring is a time for change and self-betterment, so let’s throw away these bad habits and get Mom the perfect gift: a tote bag!  There are styles and colors for everyone, and Mom will love it.  You know what else is creeping up?  I’ll give you a clue…it starts with senior ditch day, then prom, then… almost there…Graduation!  Tons of senior girls are getting ready to go off to college or into the working world.  They are going to need cute bags to carry their books and computers (or so we hope), and you, my friends, have come to the right place to find them.  If you would like to send the bags as gifts, we are happy to include gift cards and send directly to the lucky recipients.  Just email my mom at threechairs3@yahoo.com and tell her what to write on the card.

Anyway, let’s talk about what you have missed.  If I had to sum up the past few weeks in three words, I would quote my dad by calling them “The Vinyl Rollercoaster.”  It has been something of an emotional journey, this blog.  Let’s start with the compulsive checking.  I have to say, this has not been very good for my current facebook problems.  I am something of an obsessive facebook checker.  I used to come home from school, go upstairs to the computer, check my facebook, do some homework, check my facebook, eat dinner, check my facebook, do more homework, check my facebook, go to sleep.  I know that sounds crazy, but I swear it has gotten better in the past year.  Now I do my homework in the kitchen so I am no longer tempted by the computer.  The tradeoff is that I am tempted instead by dried mango and chocolate-covered pretzels, but that’s a whole separate issue.

Back to the blog.  I usually only check my facebook once or twice a night (hard to believe, I know), but in addition to checking my own page, I have added to the routine.  I check my page, then the blog, read the comments, and finally peruse The Tote Bag Chronicles facebook fan page (if you haven’t seen it yet, click on the link on our home page).  Needless to say, it is bad for my high school-student-procrastination-syndrome.   But even worse than me is my mom. She is a big proponent of the constant fan count.  I will be reading my history book and all of a sudden my mom will yell “NINETY-TWO FANS!” My favorite is the text message during school, when I feel my phone vibrate and I open it to find “NINETY-SIX FANS!”  My mom did not know how to open a new window on safari a few months ago, but now when I come home she is sitting there with both the facebook page and the blog open, eagerly reading our new comments.  So the blog/facebook checking has become pretty obsessive. 

As you can see, this is a family effort.  I write, my mom designs/checks, and my dad gives us his feedback.  But for a while, all of us kept asking, “When is Jake going to start advertising?”  My brother, Jake, is a college student, which might explain a lot, but we were all eagerly awaiting his assistance.  After about a week of nothing, my mom called him.  Jake told her that he had been very busy lately, and that he would send it on to his friends soon.  The funny part, though, was that while he was telling her all of this, he had put her on speakerphone because he was playing pool.  So we were a little irritated that he was procrastinating his family duties, but Jake redeemed himself the next day by sending the link on to his friends and posting an incredibly sweet comment on the blog.  Job well done.

So for any of you who have bought bags or left comments, thank you so much!  We love hearing what you have to say, and as you can see, it has become something of a thrill for us. Please continue to post comments, and if you have purchased a bag, send pictures of you with your bag (to my mom’s email), enlighten us with more uses, anything you want.  And remember, Gifts Gifts Gifts!


-Emma

The blahg is up and running!

If this is your first visit, take some time to read the Who Are We page.


When we got the idea to create a blog, I was a bit skeptical.  Computers? My mother?  No thank you.  But my mom’s friend assured her that it was easy.  “Just use blogspot.  It takes five minutes!” So my mom watched a webinar that teaches you about social network marketing, and she was feeling pretty good about it.  But the process still seemed a little daunting.  In steps my cousin David.


What would we do without David?  Lucky for us, David just so happens to be a computer genius. He is a student at MIT, so “nuff said”.  Anyways, David, who gets his mad technology skills from some unknown source way down the family line, happened to be on break when we dove head first into this endeavor.  So we lured him here with the promise of a good job and homemade brownies (hard to resist, I know).

It was not nearly as easy as we thought.  I came home from school last week to find David writing his own code on the computer.  I repeat: he was making up his own code.  The gibberish on the computer was simply too much for me, so I went downstairs to snack on some grapes and read The Great Gatsby, but after five-hundred-billion hours of grueling typing and clicking and code-writing and staring at numbers and symbols and connect-the-dot patterns on the screen, here we are with a fully functioning website-blog-thing.  Who knew it could be so easy?

Anyways, now that the blahg is up and running, we want to hear YOUR COMMENTS.  Feedback, stories, reactions, anything that comes to mind, we want to hear all about it.  We want this to be an interactive experience, so enough about my mom and I.  We want to hear your thoughts.  And of course, enjoy the bags.


-Emma