Go big or go home.

Sometimes we need our friends to tell us what we don't want to hear. I have had a web page, with varying degrees of success, for at least a dozen years. The latest is okay, but the friend said it - if you don't have a viable, usable, attractive website, better not have one at all.

I have hired a media firm - TJ21 Media Group in South Bend - to spiff up my site. TJ told me it wasn't bad, but needed updating, better pictures, a blog that gets updated frequently instead of when I get a minute. You see, I would much rather blog here about this and that than to have some discipline about updating my blog for product stories on my site. Time to get to work.

The journey started Tuesday night, when Liz, my assistant at the market who just happens to be a photographer for her "real" job, came over and we did pics of all of my essential oils. They will be going up on my web page shortly. I have good prices, nice variety and a source of excellent oils. So why have I been keeping them under a bushel? I'm gonna let them shine!

I've also started carrying CBD products, so they too will be featured on my page. I learned the value of CBD oil when I was on chemo. It had failed to register that while I was taking it for nausea, I no longer had to take Celebrex for tendonitis in my hip. After chemo, no more CBD oil and I was back on Celebrex -- and then the nickel dropped. CBD oil is great for inflammatory disease. There will be a new section for CBD products. I have a story to tell and a product to sell.

Fortunately my web site bones are good. The firm is prettying it up and making it more comprehensive, and providing those good old meta tags that will get me more viewers. Liz and I will be doing all of the photos, and I'm doing the pricing and product descriptions.

Stay tuned for what's happening. Here's a link to the current clunky site. Watch the progress while we work!! Ceres & Co.'s current web site/

How did I start blogging?

I have been blogging for quite a while now, starting with my farm life. So many of you have been with me through chicken stories, pet stories, cooking stories, and now, grandchildren getting married stories.

How did I start blogging? I went to a movie.

I saw Julie and Julia - twice in the theatre, and countless additional times since I bought the DVD. Julie blogged - she started a blog to talk about making every recipe in Julia Child's book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Eventually it led to a movie! I was so inspired that I walked out of the theatre, went home and wrote my first blog.

I don't do any thing tricky, just write my stuff and upload pics. My life is interesting enough that there seem to be over a hundred hits for every blog lately, and that makes me happy - happy to share bits of my life with you.

Still waiting for a movie contract though. Just saying . . .

My bookmark in the book My Life In France is a boarding pass from my trip to France!

Where have I been?

I've been pretty busy for the last week, using all of my spare time to set up my new Surface Pro 4. No time for blogging.

I am trying to simplify my life. In the walkout basement, next to my soap room, is my "office," if you can call it that. I have an older computer with a tower, a BIG screen, a nice wireless keyboard and two printers. Yes, I do often need two printers. One prints double sided without having to raise a finger, the other is the backup workhorse when I have a huge pile of printing to do and limited time.

Then there is the laptop, that I really didn't use much until I discovered how handy it was at the market. Instead of going home with a list of questions posed by my customers, I now just walk over the the laptop and google things. I'm not proud. I explain to my customers what I am doing, as well as giving them some tips to get better information when they do it themselves. And then I discovered that if I put my business apps and data files on the laptop, they were always with me. On slow days at the market, I could catch up on entering information into my accounting software, and since the desktop is really nicer, I could go home and use it, but have it talk to the laptop to get to the data files.

I should have done it with Outlook as well, but I am so afraid of messing up the files. Lots of history in those old Outlook folders, and I can find all sorts of things in that program. However, I am prone to missing meetings, or being very late for them, because I haven't gotten down to the basement to open Outlook and get organized. So I use the internet to open emails at the market, and then have to send a copy of my responses to my Outlook account so I have a record of them when I get home to the desktop, and then there's my Droid - both email accounts are on it as well, and I'm confused - VERY confused!

I have been looking at the Microsoft Surface Pro, as it supposedly could take the place of a laptop. Could it work? Really? One machine, small enough that I could slip it in a handbag, with all of the stuff I have on the desktop and the laptop! I was pretty sure that the Pro 4 would hold all I needed to transfer to the new machine.

I bought one. I moved all of the data files from the laptop over, then started with the desktop files. I RAN OUT OF ROOM! Say what? There were a lot of duplicate files, which I have since taken care of, but I hauled it back to Best Buy with the intention of buying a bigger one, or else just getting another laptop, which would have a whole lot more storage space on it for the same money.

The first thing the salesman did was hit the "RESTART" buttons on side-by-side machines, one a super-fast laptop, the other a tablet (which is what Surface Pro is). The tablet - well, it's almost like turning on a light switch. Push the button, put your face in front of the camera (that's my password) and it's running. My middle name is Impatience, so I said, okay, I need to go one higher on the Surface machines. Oops! Got a thousand dollars to spare? No way!

Then he showed me this tiny little slot into which one can slide a SIM card - like you would put into your digital camera to get more storage. For only $59, it doubled my storage space, and now I have a D: drive, which I kind of like because I can separate the files from my laptop and the files from my desktop. It appeals to my neat and orderly mind.

Back home with the Surface Pro 4, insert the SIM card, and put everything from the desktop onto that tiny little card. In my desktop, I had installed a second hard drive, just for data - one drive for applications, one for data. See, I really do have a neat and orderly mind which I was very thankful for when I had a major crash. Well, sliding a SIM card into a slot was sure easier than taking the cover off a tower, screwdriver in hand! And I can buy more of them for storing archived MSMoney files and old pictures.

Getting Outlook loaded was a bit dicey and required a call to AT&T, but all is working well. I think I'm finally there! I know, I know, it took a whole week, and I am now going to have to put up with all of the Mac people saying how much easier it it with a Mac, but I saved about $2,500. Not bad for a few hours of work crammed into my spare time, and I learned a lot!

Here's a pic of my new little baby. And BTW, if I think I need that big monitor and the ergonomic keyboard, I can hook this up to them in a nanosecond and I'm ready to roll. I'm happy.

Surface Pro 4  Follow this link to see more of what she'll do.

Here she is!