Hello all. We have been alluding to exhaustion in recent posts without really getting into the details. While both of us have been busy, Robbi gets the prize for working overtime. Between getting up on Friday morning and going to bed on Saturday night, she got exactly 27 minutes of sleep. On one hand, I think it’s amazing that she’s still alive. I simply can’t stay awake for more than 20 hours, and I have never in my life done the proverbial “all-nighter.” But Robbi, like the other Behrs, is capable of heroic stretches of backbreaking work without sleep or nourishment, most likely gleaned from decades of summers working on the tundra.

Robbi’s task for the last week or so has been a complete overhaul of the Idiots’Books e-commerce site. Fearing that an avalanche of visitors from Slate might crush our feeble WordPress e-store plugin, Robbi has been working with a third-party vendor who will host our store and help us with troubleshooting. From now on, when you buy something from us, you will go to another site for a moment to do the actual shopping and purchasing. But Robbi has been working hard to make sure that this new site looks and feels like the same old robbib5.sg-host.com you have come to know and love (you may sob gently into a Kleenex if you are feeling so moved). To do this, she developed a series of snappy, energetic banners to delight and beguile you. I love what she came up with, and can’t resist sharing them with you now.

When you get to the new store, you will be cheerfully greeted with the this artful pile of words:

Meandering over to the “books” link, you will be dazzled in the following fashion:

Hovering with alluring portent atop the “subscriptions” content you will be thus persuaded:

In search of elegant, yet humorous t-shirts or snappy new threads for your ill-mannered infant, you will first be forced to reckon with:

Upon reaching the “posters” page, your eyes will be visually assaulted along these lines:

If your constitution is stout and you make it to the “prints” page, your grim reward will be encountering this:

And if you make it all the way to the “other stuff” link (as only the most devoted shoppers will), you will be treated to some minor profanity and a rather exciting typeface (see “strange”):

In other words, this post intends to save you the trouble of actually visiting the new store (and is, therefore, a terrible idea, in the marketing scheme of things). No matter. Just know that if and when you do go to the store, it is a sturdier and more functional (if somewhat less lovely) place than it was before.

Her long work done, one would think that Robbi would be happy. Friends, she is not.

Because she is a devout realist with a tendency to low-grade pessimism, Robbi is convinced that the world will end before the Slate piece is published, and all her work will be for naught. Or that the piece will be published but not a single person will be interested in buying a single thing from us. In Robbi’s glass-mostly-empty worldview, the surest way to secure hundreds of orders would be to have kept the old e-store as it was, at which point it would have crashed, and Robbi would have been disappointed for another reason. What I’m getting at is that it’s hard to be Robbi.

Almost as hard as it is to live with her, I bet.