February was quite a full month – despite a relatively late start.
The short sum-up is: I put a bunch of teas in the Sale Bin, I took a first stab at some new platforms for social media presence, there was a post!, and I opened up some Tea of the Month Club slots.
The newsier version follows.
Not quite a week past the midpoint of the month I shook something off – or started to come out of the hazy shock I’d been drifting in for months.
Part of the blame for this can be laid at the feet of my new housemates, part of it on the inspiration and camaraderie offered by the new and fascinating and lovely gaming group I was lucky enough to be invited to, part of it on the immensely supportive tea community on Twitter… and part of it probably comes down to my own sheer stubbornness and willingness to do the work.
Early in the month I had begun work on stocking the Sale Bin with the teas I currently had on hand. Due to the need to redesign the logo and all other visual aspects of Desert Sage Natural’s presence as a company, I felt the need to clear the way for a fresh start and a lot of relabeling. That project combined with the energy granted by experimenting with new teas and ingredients helped me to go from just barely getting my feet back under me to starting to actually properly walk again.
Add in the responses to some of what I’d been sharing about what I was doing and what was going on and it turned into enough momentum that I finally managed to get my Patreon up and running. It is a bit bare bones right now, as past plans for it are no longer viable. Not as they were originally envisioned, anyway. I will be fleshing It out and adding new options as I get things sorted.
Tumblr, also, finally got its opening post, and I am starting to figure out how to navigate it – and have been amused/distressed by the fact that it is almost as easy to lose time in fascinating flickering focus on data and story and amusement gathering as it is on Twitter. It doesn’t have quite the same flavour, and I see a whole lot less of what is going on in the world, but I figure that is primarily because I follow far fewer people and haven’t developed something akin to my weird little corner of Twitter where tea and science and fandoms and politics and sheep and space and…. Intersect.
I’m getting a little bit of my rhythm back with social media. It’s been quieter, both overall and on a handful of specific topics for a long time. I covered some of the reasons as to why in my longer version of the New Beginnings post, and I will speak more to it in future posts.
In the shorter term, I am trying to choose which platforms will be properly active, and what they will be primarily used for, as I do not want to offer the exact same data and content in all the places. However, I also do not want to force following in all the places. I apologize in advance if it is a bit rough as I find the balance.
With luck, there will be a post with more details within the next week or two. There will also probably be polls on at least one or two of the platforms I currently exist on, to get a feel for what the people listening and watching would like to see where. (And, frankly, where people are going to be. Twitter’s troubles are leading to a scattering of community, and I am still trying to parse where most are intending on landing.)
Only one post in February – in two versions. It covers some of why there’d been such chaos and was the first step towards making a new start.
As previously mentioned, there are a number of teas currently in the Sale Bin, and I will be adding more over the next few weeks. It’s a bit of a longer process than previously as due to the logo issues I am currently hand-writing all the labels. Clearing these out is something that will help on a number of levels, and it offers an opportunity to try a number of my teas at a discount – including small samplings of some of the stranger creations I’ve come up with over the years.
One of the ways in which clearing out the Sale Bin will help is that it is part of making space for the teas that will be available when I reopen. Because of the way I work as both an herbalist and an artist, I will need to retest all the teas and their recipes before they go online – which meshes well with the fact that almost all of the photos will need to be retaken. This soft reopen is planned for early May, and, again, there will be a post with more details on that in the upcoming weeks. I am open to input on teas you would like to see in that first set. You can reach out through the website or via one of the currently active social media platforms. (You can most easily get my attention on Patreon, Twitter, Kofi, and Tumblr at present.)
Lastly, I did open up some Tea of the Month Club slots. The curated version slots have all already been taken, but I am allowing for a handful more of the Standard. If you are interested, likely want to act on that relatively soon.
Onward. May we all find better days.
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