Joanne Musgrave

I’m seriously considering expanding our range of MiEssence products at Shop Naturally to include the bulk of the organic skin care and possibly the make-up too. Do people really buy make-up online? Considering I never wear make-up, this is not an area I have a huge amount of experience in. Guess it’s about time to crack out the Survey Monkey to ask the opinions of the people on our mailing list.  If you’re an online junkie like me and you do buy make-up or skin care online, I would love to hear your thoughts.

On another totally unrelated note, anyone want to get grubby this afternoon? I’m off to help run the CCTRI offroad duathlon.

I can’t believe how stupid the name is of the new iPad. It’s a friggin’ tablet, call it the iTab. I also can’t believe that 240,000 of them have been ordered and paid for sight unseen and Australians have literally flown to New York ot line up to get one. (News story here).

Let’s see, it won’t run Flash applications, so you can rule out about a quarter of the world’s websites. Although, since I loathe Flash, perhaps I should be embracing Apple for a change.

Have you ever noticed that when people call Tony Abbott, Mr Abbott, it sounds like they’re saying Mr Rabbit? Journo’s, radio announcers, how friggin’ hard is it to put a little break between the Mr and the Abbott?

Anyhoo, Mr ABBOTT is up at Port Ironman today competing. He expects to complete the 3.8k swim, the 180km, bike ride and 42km run in about 14 hours. The guns from Central Coast Triathlon Club will do it in about 8 and a half hours. For those of you wondering just how far that all is, it’s 76 laps of an Olympic swimming pool but IN THE OCEAN with 1,500 other people trying to swim over you and push you out of the way, a bike ride from Sydney to Wollongong AND BACK AGAIN and to top of all off, an Olympic distance marathon.

I’m getting tired just typing it all in!

I found it amusing this morning while doing a bit of research online – a few weeks ago, I was the only online retailer selling the ecococoon stainless steel cups with a free set of the go-betweens so they don’t get stuck together.  Now at least two other competitors have decided to give away the go-betweens for free as well. So if you’ve bought some ecococoon cups online and you got a free set, you can say thank you to me later

Word of advice for the competition, if I ever catch anyone taking any of my images off any of my websites, you will get one warning, and then you will be receiving a bill for the prior use of my artwork and another bill for future use should you not remove them. As a professional web designer / artwork developer / creative director / all round internet marketing guru (my day job), I take the theft of my work, regardless of how small or insignificant the image may be, very seriously. Myself and the staff working here at Shop Naturally put a huge amount of time and effort in to making our site out shine all others on the internet and stealing my work will NOT be tolerated.

Alas, another weekend working on the shop. I will be adding the new colour klean kanteen bottles to my BPA Free Water Bottles website, and working on the BPA Free Baby Bottles on the shop and also the Safe BPA Free Baby Bottles website now that we’re expanding our range of Baby Bottles.

I may even find some time to do a couple of loads of laundry and play with my Bonsai trees.

The new Klean Kanteen coloured range of stainless steel water bottles are super funky.  Looks like the staff are going to be busy working overtime this week with adding new stock to the shop.

I had a customer write to me today and say “We are so impressed with the water flow rate with the sports 2 cap that one for each of the family in a couple of different sizes would be great for different situations.” Then she proceeded to give me a wish list of the new coloured bottles for our next stock order.

See, I’m not the only person who thinks the Klean Kanteen Bottles have the best sports cap on the market. Getting feedback like this makes the long hours slaving away at the computer worth all the effort (and the sales help pay for my new glasses!)

I got myself a new toy today, a new Polar F4 women’s heart rate monitor. The one I was using was a much better F6, but it was the big boy version and it was way too big for my tiny little girl wrist.

They’re on sale at Rebel at the moment for $129 ($70 off) if you get in quick enough!

Is 2012 coming? Is the Myan Calendar correct?

Apparently each time the planet has one of these massive earthquakes, our axis shifts a little & make our days shorter. Let’s hope if these disaster movies start coming true that NASA really does have something that can shatter an asteroid ….

I would like to say a big thank you to the folks at Theme & Variations for allowing me to spend some time in their store yesterday playing a variety of Steinway & Sons grand pianos.

What did I learn?
That I have expensive taste, to the tune of close to $200,000.

I played the most magnificent concert Steinway Grand D series that gets rented out so it’s voiced nice and bright for a concert hall. Oh my god, what a magnificent piano. I think I’m almost too scared to touch another one for a few days. When I do, I’m going to have to apologise to my ears

I am going to own a Steinway grand piano one day. Perhaps not the D series, but I will be buying a smaller one. Mark my words.

(and thank you to my lovely husband who bought me a surprise Steinway mug so I can relive the fun I had!)