Week 36 Update
Well if this isn’t THE week for “stuff happening”.
I can barely keep track of it all. I’ll do my best to bring everyone up to speed though.
PERSONAL STUFF:
- Carla & I made the trek up North the very morning I showed my mug on-camera. 8 hours of driving and very few stops made Dave a very tired boy.
- The next day, we headed into the school to see what surprises awaited her for the new school year. We spent a great deal of time cutting out letters and pinning them to bulletin boards, making name tags, etc.. A long day.
- Wednesday also saw me become 37 years young. Carla got me some awesome, thoughtful gifts. Related to the Flashlight Comics project, she got me a copy of “The Art of the Start” hardcover by Guy Kawasaki, which is a great read. It’s given me lots of food for thought. I also got a new thesaurus [a big one], so that I can find another word for describing my girlfriend besides “awesome”.
- We got the class pretty well set up by Friday and only have to go in for a few hours tomorrow to finish up.
- I submitted my resumé to the local library. They’re looking for part-time staff for evenings and weekends, which would suit my schedule well. Don’t know if I’ll get it though, since interviews take place while I’m back down South for a few weeks. We’ll see.
FLASHLIGHT STUFF:
- Wow. What HASN’T happened this week? After my appearance on A-Channel I had a number of sign ups from Ottawa area schools. That was pretty cool.
- The real surprise though, was when my mom was on a scrapbooking chat site (!) and started telling a woman in Missouri about our little venture. She was a school librarian, turns out, and listed Flashlight on the teacher-librarian listserve. That’s why I suddenly started getting hits from across Canada & the US.
- To date: Over 1500 students are signed up over 20 schools across Canada and nearly that again from the US are asking their local reps about authorization to receive it. This is crazy. One of the teachers was a good friend of our very own Jay “Clan Apis” Hosler. She’s excited by the prospect, to say the least. The librarians are on our side!
- Got an email from a media agency which I’ll follow up on Tuesday. He’s asking about opportunities, so it’s looking really good [fingers crossed].
- I have the email program up and running. I did a test of 90 school boards in Ontario and it went well enough, although there were close to 20 bouncebacks, so I’m going to have to do some tweaking for sure [a few of them were “unresolved addresses” though, not picked up as spam]. Tomorrow, I finish sending the board listings and spend a huge part of my day fixing the email addresses for the 11000 schools I have in my list.
- I will be going to Toronto in the next 3 weeks to have another strategy session before this balloons out of control. We’re really going to go to press this this year!
- I have web stuff to update, and numbers to crunch. There are a few loose ends that need my attention.
- I have to look into a new quotation from my printer. Both for the increased page count and possibly for a thinner paper stock. The mock up was only on 32 lb. stock and if I had printed all 224 pages for the interview last week, it would have been over an inch thick! That’s expensive to ship as well as daunting for a teacher to lug down to their classroom. I hope to have some new figures soon [which will drive our costs down, as well as our sponsorship prices].
UPCOMING PERSONAL STUFF:
- After Carla starts back on Tuesday, I will mostly have spending time with her as my “personal stuff”, which suits me fine, seeing as she’s one of my favourite people of all time. She’s been instrumental in helping keep me on the rails and her ideas and suggestions have been extremely useful. I really think the world of her.
Speaking of whom, it’s 10:30 pm and she’s out in the living room, patiently waiting for me to finish this. I will definitely have more postings this week!