As the number of shopping days dwindles away, things have picked up a bit. That was to be expected. My inventory planning wasn't too far off. So far I've only run out of one popular brand of recorder, but I still have others to sell. I'll probably run out of a few more things in the next couple of days. I've gone through a year's supply of music stands in three days. Weird.

But except for a couple of emergency refills, it's time to move on. Christmas buying for me is pretty much done. Now to get to work on next September again. With a whole lot of funky stuff in between. The next big thing is the trade show in January. I'm gonna' close for a few days whilst I cast a now more experienced eye on all the trade show merchandise. And it's (ughh) book buying time again. One publisher down, ten to go. Or is it a dozen now? I forget. My cranium is too busy trying to process about 4500 titles and recall which sold quickly. Then view a few million other titles and try and find the ones I might need or want. With a couple of these publishers, the catalog is larger than the average phonebook and just about as densely listed. The order forms run into hundreds of pages.

Keeping track of sold books is really a job for the computer, but the time cost of maintaining the database is prohibitive. It requires a full-fledged POS (point-of-sale) system with scanners and all that and it costs big bucks to get into that game. Today I do it the old-fashioned way.

Add one more thing to the list of items that should never be microwaved. But you'll have to discover this one for yourself. I'm not talking. Nope.