In which I battle the Post Office and tape guns, yet still find joy.

 The second sale has shipped -- way behind schedule, but with cold packs included (with everything in Ziploc bags to battle condensation) for the hotter southern states. I still have a small stack of local deliveries to do, and need to send e-mail confirmations to that effect.

I was speaking to a friend on the phone yesterday, and I told her that I now understand why it takes six weeks to get an order from BPAL -- and they have a staff. I'm just one person, doing the candy making, the inventory and ordering, the shipping and receiving, the graphic design ... it's daunting. I'm enjoying the hell out of it, don't get me wrong. But it's time consuming and detail-intensive, and my inner perfectionist shrieks with rage every time something doesn't go just right, even though these are, in effect, dress rehearsals for the actual website. This is just one adorable way in which I'm insane, according to my infinitely patient husband.

And so, some things have been discovered and considered in recent days:

Dealing with the U.S. Postal Service is an exercise in frustration. Yeah, yeah, like I'm the first person to find this out. I opened a case of large flat-rate Priority Mail boxes and found that some of them were "APO/FPO Address Only" boxes. Not all of them, just some of them. And they were mixed in randomly, which begs the question of how they got in there in the first place (I suspect a warehouse employee who was told to pack X number of cases and just didn't give a damn.)  Also, after already charging my customers about $1.50 less for shipping than I was paying -- figuring I'd absorb the cost to be user friendly -- the USPS raised the Priority Rate price on the standard boxes from $8.95 to $9.80. Nice. Oh, and nowhere in either the PayPal shipping function or on the Stamps.com site is there an option for printing a label for the large shipping box -- in fact, PayPal says that the one rate will ship anything.

There is no such thing as a usable tape gun.  When I was helping my friend Mia pack up a house a few months ago, we battled with the expensive metal tape gun that she had bought, finding that the cheap Scotch plastic things from the drugstore actually worked better. I currently have three different plastic tape thingies, and the most functional of them will do about 8 boxes in a row before the tape slips out of the guide and glues to itself so thoroughly that it takes ten minutes to peel it back off. And the best of the lot is still the cheap red Scotch tape from the drugstore, except that it comes with about a foot-and-a-half of tape on it, and it's not refillable. Forget artisanal chocolates -- if I could invent a freaking tape dispenser that works, I'd be a gazillionaire.

Some things never change.  It's been a long time since I was a pastry chef, but I still hate some basic tasks associated with the job. De-skinning hazelnuts is one of them. After toasting the raw nuts in the oven, you drop them into a clean towel and, in theory, rub them so that all of the skins come off. But they never all come off, so you have to pick through them and scrape off the stubborn bits, and no matter how careful you are there are still millions of little bits of hazelnut skin that gets on the table, on your clothes, in your hair ... it's a testament to how much I love hazelnuts that I'm willing to do this. But I swear like a sailor every time.

I still find joy in making something.  I am, in many ways, what showman Jim Rose refers to as a "jaded fuck." But every day I discover that I still get a kick out of creating things, and I feel a great swell of pleasure with each completed box of chocolates. I love the way the truffles look, all lined up in there. I love the way the ribbon wraps around the box, and the font that I used for the logo. I love the heft of the finished package, and the whole process of packing and shipping something that I made myself. It's sort of sappy, I guess ... but it brings me joy. Okay, I get mad at the tape gun. A lot. But other than that? Bliss.

Comments

[Habuchan]

Oh dear.

I think you forgot to include the cold pack in my shipment because it wasn't in there, just packing paper and everything is completely melted :( The post office just delivered it and there's...nothing indistinguishable. I popped it into the fridge and hopefully they'll set up a little bit so I can try them.

I'm so sad right now:( I knew Texas was hot, but I didn't realize it would completely devastate the truffles.

[Molly]

Maybe you could also make a lot of money selling de-skinned hazelnuts. :)

(BTW, I'm finding a box for your books AS I TYPE. OK, not exactly. But close.)

[Dawn]

Habuchan - I left a reply for you over on Live Journal. You'll get a replacement with a cold pack in the next shipment. Some boxes were mailed on Wednesday, then the gel packs arrived (of course) on Thursday. You must have been a Wed. shipment. I apologize for the meltiness -- they should still taste good, but you'll definitely get a replacement.

[Mary Crowell]

Mine arrived in unmelted and beautiful condition! (And I'm one of your Alabamian customers.) I'm trying to pace myself and not just devour them all at one sitting. They are very yummy, so this not easy. :-) I am half-way through my sins-plus-one, and I have enjoyed them all. My favorite so far is wrath because I like the mixture of chocolate and spicey, but Envy was a close second.

I know you are still in the early phases of your chocolate business, but I was wondering if one could A) order multiple copies of a given chocolate or B) (with sufficient notice and extra money) purchase some sweetened with Splenda.

I have heard that getting the proportions right with Splenda in sugar is tricky, but one thing I have had difficulty finding is sufficient variety of Splenda sweetened chocolate. So, there is definitely a place in the mail order chocolate business for someone who could provide that sort of variety.

Excellent product and well worth the wait for cooler weather. Thank you very much!

Mary

[Mary Crowell]

Mine arrived in unmelted and beautiful condition! (And I'm one of your Alabamian customers.) I'm trying to pace myself and not just devour them all at one sitting. They are very yummy, so this not easy. :-) I am half-way through my sins-plus-one, and I have enjoyed them all. My favorite so far is wrath because I like the mixture of chocolate and spicey, but Envy was a close second.

I know you are still in the early phases of your chocolate business, but I was wondering if one could A) order multiple copies of a given chocolate or B) (with sufficient notice and extra money) purchase some sweetened with Splenda.

I have heard that getting the proportions right with Splenda in sugar is tricky, but one thing I have had difficulty finding is sufficient variety of Splenda sweetened chocolate. So, there is definitely a place in the mail order chocolate business for someone who could provide that sort of variety.

Excellent product and well worth the wait for cooler weather. Thank you very much!

Mary

[Mary Crowell]

Mine arrived in unmelted and beautiful condition! (And I'm one of your Alabamian customers.) I'm trying to pace myself and not just devour them all at one sitting. They are very yummy, so this not easy. :-) I am half-way through my sins-plus-one, and I have enjoyed them all. My favorite so far is wrath because I like the mixture of chocolate and spicey, but Envy was a close second.

I know you are still in the early phases of your chocolate business, but I was wondering if one could A) order multiple copies of a given chocolate or B) (with sufficient notice and extra money) purchase some sweetened with Splenda.

I have heard that getting the proportions right with Splenda in sugar is tricky, but one thing I have had difficulty finding is sufficient variety of Splenda sweetened chocolate. So, there is definitely a place in the mail order chocolate business for someone who could provide that sort of variety.

Excellent product and well worth the wait for cooler weather. Thank you very much!

Mary

[Nycorson]

I have to say I got the chocolates on Friday.. and have been slowly savoring them, one a day. Lust was good, and Sloth, Envy I am still thinking about, I keep thinking that a core of dark chocolate would have balanced out all the white ganache... but... I don't know. Your intensifying of the key lime might solve that. But last night I ate Wrath. Oh My Goddess!!! I want more, boxes of it, it puts every other spicy chocolate I have had to shame. That one blew me away. So I am slowly moving through the box of chocolates, but yes more Wrath please.

[Gin]

I loved them all. The clove was slighty overpowering in wrath, but it was still yummy! My favorite was gluttony though. Can't wait for the next pre-order sale!