Photo-shoot

It’s dull and raining again this morning as I head off down to the school with my littlest girl. Being a Tuesday, I’m due in to listen to readers in her class, which I haven’t done since before the flu took over our family, and most of February, and I’m quite looking forward to it as it might just begin to make me feel like I’ve got my life back on track a bit.

Back home I look around the kitchen with a sense of satisfaction- after all my work yesterday I made sure I got the washing up done straight after dinner last night as I could see that no one else was going to bother to do it for me. Poor Mike wandered into the kitchen just as I was running the water, and felt shamed into doing the drying up, so maybe we’re making some sort of progress!

I don’t mean to make it sound like my family are lazy. They are clearly not, and work extremely hard in their day to day work and school lives, achieving good grades and being praised highly- even if those out at work never seem to be rewarded financially in any way. The point is though, that they just don’t seem to understand that housework doesn’t do itself. It’s probably my fault in reality- I have to admit I’m one of those sad people who actually enjoys the cleaning, washing and ironing, and being a stay-at-home mum I’ve always quite happily taken it on as my responsibility. We don’t have a highly polished ‘show home’- with seven people all living under the same roof there would never be time to achieve it. However, it niggles at me a bit that while I spent nearly three weeks unable to actually do it no one else seems to have noticed the jobs piling up. This now means I have to work three times as hard to get the house back to the state it should have been in, and it feels like I’m being punished for daring to be ill, which seems a little unfair.

Today’s main housework job is to get downstairs vacuumed, I’d like to aim at upstairs too but again, even I can see that to do too much in one go could end up with me needing to take more time out- which I can’t afford to do. The weather has brightened up a lot, with no sign of yesterday’s wintry showers so I’m also aiming to clean the stairs so that I can finally get my photos of the new demo dresses taken while the sun is actually shining. My two biggest girls are both around again today, and settle themselves in front of the telly just as I get the vacuum out. As the living room needs the most actual ‘tidying’ before I can clean it thoroughly I was only going to give the middle of the floor a quick going over anyway, but that doesn’t stop them complaining that I’m making too much noise when I’m in the hall!

With the hall, dining room and stairs all cleaned, I’ve just about finished my quick go of the living room when the vacuum decides to stop working- it seems even a Dyson knows when it’s being over worked! With time once again running away from me, I decide it’s best to pack it away for now, and check for blockages next time I get it out- probably sometime in the next couple of days!

After a quick lunch, and check over of emails, Facebook page etc. I take out the new dresses and fetch my Annabell ‘model’. It takes a while to get decent shots of all the dresses, and all the different views of the dresses that I want to show, but looking at the pictures on the computer I’m happy with my mini photo shoot. The photos need editing before I can add them to the website- they all need compressing or they’ll be rejected for being too large. It’s a time consuming process, as although not terribly complicated I haven’t yet worked out how I can change more than one at once. With several photos of each taken, I firstly have to narrow them down to the four or five each that I want to actually use, and then resize each one individually.

With the photos now an acceptable size, I then add them onto the dress descriptions. Again, this takes a while, despite the fact that it’s a fairly straight forward job. While I’m editing the dresses, I take another look at the descriptions to make sure that everything is accurate- I know for example that I originally described the St. David’s Day dress as white with flowers, when it’s actually cream. It may not sound terribly important, but firstly I know I can be a bit of a perfectionist, and secondly if I want to be taken seriously in the world of business- all be it a tiny one- accuracy is very important, and I don’t need any complaints that I’ve miss-sold something!!

With the photos added, I then highlight a couple of the dresses on the homepage of the website to draw attention to them. I then also add them to the Facebook page, in a new photo album I’ve created especially for these and any other seasonal dresses I add throughout the year. By now its dinner time- Mike came to the rescue when he rang just as I was in the middle of resizing the photos, and has bought something quick and easy for tea, so my dinner plans went out of the window. Or to be more accurate, they went into the fridge! At least that’s tomorrow night’s dinner already sorted then…