Gene and I spent the better part of this memorial day weekend signing books and stuffing envelopes. My housemate will be lugging the 500+ packages to the post office over the course of this week - if we got your payment by Saturday your order will ship out by end of week. We will probably do another shipment next weekend to take care of the orders for which payments dribble in before then.

We've been doing this for a while now. This is our third book, of course, but it happens when we release a new piece of merchandise and during the winter holidays. We're getting pretty good at it. The investments I've made into our database are really paying off now - things like grouping together all the book-only orders really increase our productivity. And we've learned how to set up our physical environment.

Should we be spending our valuable time this way? Probably not for much longer. The balance between high margin (which we get from selling books ourselves) and productivity is starting to teeter over. But we've probably got another year.

Meanwhile, I'm back at my desk drawing strips while Gene packs up the last dozen orders. I don't intend to have any more late strips any time soon. And we have some funny stuff coming up.