I’ve used it before, and it looks like I’ll have to use it again. I was tending to the garden, rather, I was twiddling the bits that comprise the backend of the website, and I got to thinking about streamlining, and general housecleaning.
I’ve got three URLs that point here, as of now. The obvious one? astrofish dot net, the original. The second? astrofish dot org, and finally, one I added a few months back? LowBrowMystic dot com. The first two are obvious, the last one is an old moniker from a Gemini & Virgo, a name someone took for a while, but then didn’t use. I just bought it up on sale, and I have it point here.
So pursuant to the idea of reviewing everyone’s Egg Nog (something) coffee drink, I got off wondering about how my horoscopes fit with the rest of what’s out there.
It’s simple. The places I prefer, like Jo’s, Bouldin Creek, Halcyon, Little City, and the Hideout? Those places all qualify as “funky.” A bit off-beat. One step different from mainstream.
Places like Halcyon have cleaned themselves up a little too much, but the coffee’s agreeable, and it’s a prime location for me, being just a block out of the way coming or going to the post office. Bouldin is preferable these days, but my tastes will vary. Plus I try to suit a spot to any clients I might be meeting. Places like Bouldin are sometimes a little too funkified for the more refined and elegant clients.
“I can’t just stop off at your house?”
It’s a trailer. It’s 300 square feet. No, you can’t. There’s always that problem with stalkers, too. Don’t laugh, it’s happened before – “But you’re a guy; guys don’t have stalkers.”
Oh, that’s right, just groupies.
In case the message has been missed, I live like a monk. Solitary. Well, I do have a rather large and aging “old lady” cat, but I’m not sure she counts. On cold nights? She’s like an electric heating pad. That purrs. And needs her litter box cleaned.
Which reminds me, it’s like a coffee shop. A little coffee shop. The furniture doesn’t always match. Sometimes the metaphors are strained. Sometimes, too, the help is a little surly.
“Surly to bed, surly to rise, I always say.”
There are very places that I go that I’m not known. I was relating tale about what happened the other evening, to my folks, when they were in town. A girl (some woman, actually) was fixing a shot of espresso, offered me a double because she had to draw two instead of one, and I asked her birthday. She looked at me, “You’re Kramer, right?”
I never got to finish the rest of the story, so in my parents’ minds, it has become a myth.
Which has nothing to do with funky coffee shops, the little, one-off places.
Nicest Leo guy owns/operates the Hideout these days. Or he did. Haven’t seen him in weeks. I stopped in one afternoon and I gave him some pat Leo advice, I’d just reread the scopes for the coming week, and it fit his situation perfectly. I like to be right, so do Leos, but that’s not part of this discussion I’m having with my keyboard.
In passing, several times, I’ve learned that he bought the place to learn something about the business end of the business, which, apparently, he has. Much to his chagrin, he’s also learned about the depth of depravity, too. Retail is like that. Never underestimate how cruel, vicious, mean-spirited, un-enlightened some people can be. I suppose, though, that those generalities cut right through just about everyone’s business. Or even day-to-day human interactions.
I did learn more about coffee from one lad who worked at the Hideout than I’ve gleaned from most of the others. Taurus. He graduated to a real job, from what I last heard. That happens to some people.
The coffee shop metaphor isn’t lost, though. Each place has its own little eccentricities. Even though Halcyon is nothing more than a really cleaned up Ruta Maya, there are days when I miss the shock value alone of a unisex bathroom. I don’t think that would fly, not these days. And I’m not taking my funk too funky.
But each place has a signature, a feeling a gentleness of some kind or another. A warm greeting, a particular face manning (or “womanning”?) the espresso machine.
A recent occurrence at Bouldin was telling in this fashion. The proprietor (ess), Aries, was bussing a few tables. That’s the way it goes with a small, so-called, “Mom & Pop” store. Which is nice to see. I owned a place once. My similar telling moment was returning from a gala event, dressed in a fancy suit, and having to plunge the toilet in the lady’s room. Small business owners understand this. Oh, do we ever.
I streamlined the scopes to the most popular, weighing volume of traffic against time to write the material, and what would be easiest to maintain. I settled on weekly. I even, at one point, held down a regular (part-time) job to help keep this site afloat.
This last year has been good to me. However, on three separate occasions, I made more money at the casino, in a few hours’ time, than I made meeting with clients all weekend. I’m not about to abandon what I enjoy doing, though, and run off to become a professional gambler. Some days, I don’t win. Never take more than you’re willing to lose.
I’d love to hit it big, and then, I’d just run this site for free. Scopes for free. All I would need then is a measly 4 million dollar lottery ticket. Unfortunately, I don’t have one of those right now. Therefore, there has to be some way to pay for it all.
I’ve worked my way along, and more and more of the free web is starting to charge, or beg for bandwidth. There’s an animated cartoon site I like. I looked into helping with hosting, but when I got to the fine print, I found out what the volume of bandwidth was, and I couldn’t do that much, not without compromising my own site. Ever seen the “user has exceeded allotted bandwidth” messages? Yes sir, can’t have that here.
I nipped, tucked, and sewed up as many loose ends as I could, and I’m loathe to run ads, but if I get paid for it, and if that money goes to defray the cost of running the site, then I’m going to do it. More than one email has suggested, “Run all the ads you want! Won’t bother me! I don’t pay attention to them anyway….”
That’s the problem. Or part of the problem. No clicks means no revenue for the advertisers and that means no revenue for the site.
I got one the other day, “I wouldn’t want to pay for your stupid horoscopes anyway.” Yes, I feel your pain. It hurts to think, doesn’t it?
Rather sanctimonious of me, now isn’t it? Must be me, then.
But that’s what this is all about. A few egregious errors always make it through the editing process. No matter how many proofreaders proof the material, there’s always one, two, maybe three that sneak through, right up until it’s all live on Thursday morning at 12:00 AM (Mountain Time – where the server is.)
That’s kind of like the mouse (computer mouse) with a the bathroom key attached at the Hideout. It’s like the innkeeper at Boudlin bussing tables. It’s like the rickety chairs at Little City with their canvas covers. It’s that special touch. Means it’s not homogenized or recycled from some other source, either.
It also means, when the plumbing is backed up? Only one person gets the joy of fixing it. That’s me.
