I think these chickens are just hilarious. Here are three of them crammed into the magic nesting box. The other two were trying to get in just before I snapped this pic. Quite a bit of arguing ensued:

No one else I know has chickens with this particular habit. Oh well. It makes gathering eggs very easy.

For those of you wondering what's happening with the site, well . . . here's the story. As part of my year-end review of my business, I realized that the way I have things set up is very fragmented. That wasn't on purpose—it's more a result of the way things have evolved and changed in the knitting world over the past couple of years. When I first set up my website, I was selling mostly direct-to-knitters and selling mostly hard-copy products. That involved paying a fee to the hosting company and a fee to the bank to process credit card payments. Along the way, I began having to pay additional fees for the ability to offer digital downloads and to sell through Ravelry. Oh, and the bank got greedy and began tacking all sorts of additional fees onto my merchant account (like $10 a month for me to receive a paper statement of my account activity and a yearly "membership" fee in addition to the processing fees—really?!?!?!?). More and more of my sales are happening through places like Ravelry and Patternfish and fewer directly through my website, so it no longer makes sense for me to pay for some of these features when I'm not using them as much. So I felt it was time to streamline things.

I've been quite happy with Squarespace as my blog hosting company. A few days ago I began playing around with the site to see if it would be possible to build a completely Squarespace-hosted site that also offers e-commerce and isn't just a "gallery" of my work (Squarespace doesn't have a built-in shopping cart feature). It looks like I'll be able to ditch the bank's merchant account service (yay!) and move the site totally over to Squarespace from my existing hosting company. The best part of all of this is that my hosting and e-commerce costs will drop from something like $300 a month to more like $100 a month. That's huge. And I'll still be able to accept credit cards, but it will be through PayPal now and not a separate merchant account.

This seems like a good time to do this. I've finished my classwork for this semester, and I have a few weeks before the new semester begins. I usually spend this time getting the current year wrapped up and ready for our accountant anyway. I really didn't mean to obliterate the existing blog; while experimenting with Squarespace, I pressed the wrong button and poof!—there it went. I won't do that again.

I'm off in a few moments to pick up DD#1 from the train station. She's getting to be quite the seasoned traveler, getting herself from school to home and back again. It will be nice to have her here for a couple of weeks.