Remember that old rhyme? “Cross my heart and hope to die.  Stick a needle in my eye.”  How about sticking a wooden meat skewer into your eye?  It’s kind of a hard thing to do normally, but this is how I did it.  After I put on mascara I like to separate any eyelashes that are stuck together.  I use a wooden meat skewer to perform this delicate operation because it has a nice fine point.

If this point is applied to the eyeball rather than the eyelash, however, things change in an instant.  What has started out as a beauty routine ends in a medical emergency.  Luckily, after an hour of tears streaming out of the eye whenever I opened it, it seemed to recover and I was okay.  I was relieved that an eye patch wasn’t going to become part of my daily attire.

Last week I converted another fruitcake hater, so am another inch closer to Fruitcake Heaven.  Wendy McLellan of the Province interviewed me a few weeks ago for the Minding your own Business column in which I’ll be featured on March 30th.  In passing, she said that she was actually a fruitcake hater.  Of course I told her I was sending her a fruitcake, and she said, “Please don’t.  I will not eat it.”

Imagine how thrilled I was to receive her e mail last week saying that she had been forced to open the fruitcake when she had guests and no other dessert.  She wrote, “It was DELICIOUS” and said I had made another convert.  These types of e mails always seem to come in the nick of time, as I’m daily on the verge of packing it in.

Seriously, every five minutes I’m deciding that this is a hare-brained idea and that I should just stop it.  Then I’ll send out a few e mails to stores, feeling sure they’ll reply that they hate my product, and sure enough, either an order is placed or kind words are conveyed.  The nice owner of a new store in Courtenay called Brambles said she adored my fruitcakes and will be ordering them again.

Oh fine.  I’ll keep at it, but marketing is a daily struggle.  If you look at my home page, you’ll see that Steve, the brilliant web designer, has put up a nice ad for Mother’s Day.  Google Ad Words always sends out very good advice and I’d received an e mail regarding Mother’s Day marketing.  What better for a mom who has everything than one of my fruitcakes?

In case you think I’ve totally forgotten that Easter is yet to come, I can assure you that thanks to Martha’s mag, I have not.  I studied the section on how to decoupage blown-out eggs, and seriously considered purchasing the recommended ostrich and emu eggs.  Then I imagined cutting out the teensy tiny shapes, applying glue to them, then painting the entire finished product with glue, and suddenly felt all motivation drain from my body.  It’s probably much better to use that time to search out beauty treatments that do not maim the recipient.