I have a few newly-prepared black cat bones in stock now. It’s not a whole skeleton – it’s not even half a skeleton – but I do have a couple of bones that aren’t already "spoken for" if you are reading this and you have recently asked me about bone availability. They are not as white as some earlier batches have been – I clean them the slow, old-fashioned way, by burying them. I use certain timing measures and moon phases in their burial and preparation, in accordance with the way I was taught in central Alabama in the early 90s. When they are ready to be dug up, they then get a peroxide bath and a toothbrush scrubbing. But it takes a while to get the bones really white – these are likelier to be a bit yellower and/or stained than the ones in the photos you’ve seen. If you going to be grossed out by a less-than-lily-white bone, then you might want to pass on this batch (by the time they could get whiter, they’ll probably all be gone or spoken for for amulets and mojo bags).
I’ve had several clients and customers write over the past couple of months looking for black cat bones for individual sale, not as part of a pendant or mojo or the like. I stopped listing individual black cat bones a couple of years ago, when one of my long-time suppliers became no longer a good source and my access to black cat bones became greatly constrained. (I won’t buy or obtain them from just anybody – I have to trust the person that the death was from natural causes or accident and that the animal was not killed or harmed by the person trying to sell me the bones. And some folks will lie just because they have the opportunity to make some cash off the "crazy brujeria chick who will give you money for your roadkill or your neighbor’s dead pet, man!" I have to guard against those types, so even meeting a new potential source can take a while to result in new bones, because I have to check these people out and get to know them. If you’re a newer reader and/or not familiar with my take on and use of black cat bones, follow the tags to learn more about my ethics on the matter, and more about why I think they’re valuable curios even without all the gruesome cat-torture spells that are supposed to result in getting the One Single Magic Bone from a black cat).
So I’m sorry I’m using social networking sites to post this, when several of you asked to be remembered and probably wanted a heads up before I made these public, but I am not really capable of keeping track of all the requests I get for things. I get SO MANY emails every day, and it’s plenty of struggle just to keep up with the inbox on top of my other full time job[*] and making, packing, and managing product sales, not to mention the queue for readings and consultations, which has been about 8 deep since I got back from England. I am not saying this to sound like I’m whining; I’m just trying to explain what my inbox looks like every day so you guys don’t get mad at me when I can’t remember who asked for what two weeks ago. Could I keep a list and go down it to notify people when something they wanted came back into stock? Sure, but I’d be out of business soon, because maintaining such a wish list is not a rent-paying activity, and most of my activities have to be rent-paying activities. (Please ask me how much time I spent earlier this week tracking down something I stopped carrying but thought I had one more of in a drawer somewhere, for a client who asked for some custom work using this Item I no longer sell. And then ask me if he actually purchased the thing I went out of my way looking for when I had so many other things on my to-do list (like the readings and consultations and light setting reports that are late right now). Hint: the answer’s no. Multiply things like that by 50 on an average week, and you might begin to get an idea of why I just have to draw some arbitrary limits sometimes. I just don’t have time to do things that way, not when I am busting my butt to stay on top of the regular day to day business; I sincerely hope you guys who’ve asked don’t take it personally that you didn’t get personal email. I just can’t remember for sure who you were except for the very last, most recent person to ask, but I did encourage him to just email me later lest I forget.
(I get people who will write me after not having any contact in a year, and they will sign the email with their first name or nothing at all, and it will say things like "things have changed since we last talked, what do you recommend?" I guess it seems like, since we spend so much talking over things, it would be impossible for me to forget you. But it’s not about that at all – it’s about the fact that I have twenty "Deborahs" in my files, for instance, and I’ve made at least a hundred mojo bags in the last 12 months since I spoke to you last. I might have recognized your name and even remembered some significant things about you, if you’d signed the email with your name, but that’s not to say I have much of a memory at all of what you’ve bought in the past, not unless I ended up doing some fairly complicated altar work for you, or had done a consultation rather recently. So this is something any client of any worker should keep in mind – you may not deal with twenty workers every day, but your worker could very well deal with twenty potential clients every day. If there’s been a lapse in communication, you can help your worker help you by briefly recapping the situation and the work and being sure to *sign your full name.* What seems like a "quick question" to you could mean your worker has to dig through files and/or databases to find your case file/notes – multiply your "quick question" by the "quick question" of the other 50 people who emailed that day, and you have a raving mad rootworker who also happens to be starving to death because she’s engaged in non-billable work. This isn’t to make it sound like we boil everything down to money money money – plenty of us do pro bono work and/or support various charities and causes we feel strongly about. It’s just basically a question of not assuming everybody remembers your favorite color or dog’s name, but that that doesn’t mean they don’t care about their clients, and keeping in mind that rootworkers are human too, and they have power bills to pay, and if they do too much free work, then they will end up not being able to afford to be a rootworker anymore. And so their drawing of limits and boundaries also doesn’t mean that they don’t care about their clients.)
I don’t mean to make it sound like "oh my god I have so much business," because I actually don’t. It’s just that the business I do have, I do everything myself. And I don’t mean to make it sound like "I wish people would stop writing me emails," because I don’t wish that. I’m just one little old person trying to take care of her customers and her small handful of clients, and I want very much for you guys to understand where I’m coming from and what my days look like so you don’t take it personally if I can’t remember what city you were born in or whether your mojo bag had an angelica root in it or not. (or whether you asked me to write you when I got some cat bones in.)
Livejournal and facebook are the best I can do right now, sorry!
So forward that last email to me in which you told me what you were wanting in terms of bones, and I’ll get back to you re. what I have. Or drop into the ebay store and see if any of the new listings strike your fancy. Or leave me a message here (or send a direct email), letting me know what you’re interested in. I have some fragments and chips, a couple of ribs, a couple of leg bones, some vertebra.
I do not have a complete skull, a complete tail, etc from this batch – i have a broken pelvis, a broken scapula, and about half of a skull; sorry, the dogs got to it the day after I buried it and I had to fight them over the damned skeleton and move a big-ass piece of paving stone over the interment spot.
There’s a leg bone up for auction on ebay, as well as a black cat bone gambling charm and a black cat bone bracelet.
Thanks for reading! I’ll try to put up a substantive hoodoo post this coming weekend instead of just babbling and bitching.
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[*] I’m not kidding. I work full time during the day, and then I come home and work full time plus on the store, the altars, clients and customers, etc. That’s why my emails tend to come between the hours of 5 pm and 5 am. I do not sleep 8 hours a night. I sleep on the weekends, hence my not being open for business and not shipping on weekends.
Big Lucky Hoodoo 