It feels like it’s been non-stop craziness all week long, so far. Yes, it’s the last week before faire, and yes, it’s usually very busy, but we generally have four other people helping us get things finished. This year, it feels more like everyone else quit & left us to finish putting a faire on. We’re pretty much in charge of picking up donations for the pie-eating contests & cakewalk, every morning before 9, so we did that at 8, Troy had to go record commercials for the radio at 10:30, he had to write & deliver the ads for the two LED marquees here in town & I had four phone calls dealing with last minute changes to the map & stuff for the program. That was just today.

I’d like a little time to get my own stuff done, honestly. Thankfully, all of our inventory except for soap is ready to go, or I’d be screwed. When I was trying to decide what the best home based business for me was a few years ago, I hadn’t counted on trying to put on a faire with just Troy & I, I assumed I’d had time to get stuff for my booth finished before faire actually started. Don’t get me wrong, I love doing faire & I love my business, I just think I might have planned differently if I had known some things back in January is all.

Anyway, Dawn & I have to go to Las Vegas tomorrow night to pick up Dave, so we’ll be walking in the morning so we don’t miss another day this week. We aren’t going tonight because it’s pouring down rain right now & thundering. I didn’t relish getting cold & wet tonight, so we called it off. I plan to go through my loaner garb tonight & get things separated by sizes to take over to my friend’s house for people to go through. I should probably cut soap & package it while I’m at it, too.

I’m on the downhill side of faire preparations, which is a great thing, especially since setup starts next week. I have all of my glass runes finished, except for some package inserts & everything else is priced, packaged & boxed up to be taken to the park. I need to cut some soap bars & label them, get my garb ready to go & decide which bodices I’m wearing & repair one of them & I’ll pretty much be done.

I’m finally starting to get excited about faire, it’s taken me awhile this year, but I’m getting there. I wish I had some comfortable shoes to wear for it, like a nice pair of Dansko clogs, but since I don’t, I guess I’ll do what I normally do & just go barefoot.

I’m anxious to see what other people will be bringing to the booth, I know that one of the boys of the tribe is making windchimes with his grandpa this week & I love windchimes & have always wanted some for the booth. I don’t know if anyone else has anything finished or will have by then, but it’ll be interesting to see.

Well, I need to go, gotta shower & get ready to fo to my parents’ house for a barbecue & there are afew other things that need to be done before we leave.

I remember when my kids had already decided what they wanted to dress up as for Halloween by January. They would sit around & talk about all of the costumes they had seen that fall & discuss the pros & cons of each one & what they would do better if it was them. Then they’d get creative & start thinking of their own unique designs & ideas, and sometimes they’d get pretty wild & I’d have no idea how I was ever going to put it together for them, but we always managed, between them & their willingness to create on their own & me, we did it.

By June or July, they were asking me about our party & helping me decide what our Halloween invitations were going to look like & when it would be. We’d start looking at recipes & trying to figure out which one might win the contest, which ones were too disgusting to try & we’d laugh & have such a good time.

I guess I’m feeling a little melancholy today. I miss the kids, they’re all gone right now & we rarely see Rhi anymore. Maybe it’s the old days I miss, when the kids were younger & happy with the simple things, especially now, when life is complicated for us. I’m sure that when things mellow out again, I won’t be sad anymore.

I made a large order for the booth a couple of days ago & then ordered more bottles, some frankincense & a green tea fragrance yesterday, along with a nice cashbox. This morning I started the repackaging of the oils, which is involving more than I thought it was going to, since the bag tags I made earlier in the spring were too big. I’m trying to get all of this finished before the weekend, since we’re going camping & I won’t have those days to work on it & when we get back Monday, all I’ll want to do is nap & relax.

Sometimes I think it would a lot easier if I wrote phenphedrine reviews for a living instead of having the booth & trying to make the website pay for itself, but since I don’t, I guess I’ll just keep on trying to make this thing I do work out for us.

Don’t get me wrong, I love doing it & I enjoy meeting the people who visit the booth, it’s just a lot of work, for so far, not very much in return. Each year I try to change things around & make them better, hoping for a little more success. It hasn’t worked out amazingly, but I’ll keep trying, it’s fun, even if it does cost me more than I make every year.

I’m just about out of time to get everything packaged & ready to go, and because of that, I’m going to have to repackage some oils. I just don’t have time to get more postcards printed, I’ll be doing great if the bottles I just ordered get here on time. So, I guess I’ll take the stuff out of the packages that I already prepared and just use the small bags & tags that I had made before. It should work out fine & I’ll just give a postcard with each purchase, instead of each individual oil.

I did make a big order through the company I wholesale through yesterday, so that should be shipping pretty soon & I’m excited for it to get here so we can get everything priced & ready to go. I have no idea what our booth is going to be like or how we’ll be situating it yet & probably won’t until setup day. That’s what happens when you have other people making your walls & such, but that’s okay, I’m excited to see the whole thing put together.

I had thought to order a bunch of custom water bottles for the guild, so we all knew which ones were ours on the two setup days, but of course, I ran out of time for that, too. I hope to be able to do so much better with my planning next year, but I’ll have so many other things to do that, honestly, who knows if I will or not?

I know I’ll have to do my shopping starting a lot earlier, just so I can have everything that I want to sell by the time faire comes around & I know I can make sure that happens & not have to take so much from the family checking account in one big order. Anyway, that’s what’s going, 4 weeks before the first day of faire.

We have that long until the first day of faire. I’m so not ready, not for any of it. We have no walls for the stage sewn, we don’t even know which stage we’re using yet and so we don’t have measurements for the walls, either. I don’t have enough stock, or enough bottles or anything completely packaged. I don’t even know if the walls I asked to be made for my booth are actually getting made or not.

I have too much on my mind & too many things that need to be done, I can’t seem to focus on any of them for long enough to finish anything. There are so many things that will be changing this year & even more for next that I feel like we ought to send out baby announcements to tell everyone about the birth of this new project.

I’ve been trying to get the business website up & running, so people can buy things from me online, but that’s going slowly, too, especially with me trying to get everything else finished in such a short time. It may not be live until after faire, with the rate I’m working on it right now. I do plan to try to get some things done tonight, after my walk, so hopefully, I won’t be as stressed tomorrow.

I know, it’s been a week since I last posted, I’ve been so busy that it’s hard to find time right now. Everything will mellow out a little bit after faire, at least for a couple of weeks, then we can start planning for next year.

All of the oils & perfumes are made & bottled, I’ve just slacked off on packaging them. I get so bored back there by myself that I only do a few then I stop. I need to just suck it up & print off all of the inserts, get them cut out & just get it done. I could ask Dawn to come over & help me next weekend & I know she would, so maybe I’ll do that. We’ve decided to buy incense this year & probably the herbs, too, we just ran out of time & have to get things ready to go. I’ll talk to her this afternoon & see if can get the other stuff planted today, so they’ll be big enough to sell by faire.

She & I spend a lot more time together these days, since we started walking everyday. It’s been good for our bodies & good for the soul, too. There’s just something about the place that we walk that revives us spiritually & energizes our friendship. We were pushing Beth (Dawn’s grand-daughter) in her stroller while we were walking the other day, talking about how many years it had been since either of us had pushed one & how much we hated those dinky umbrella strollers, when the subject of kids & pregnancy came up & I mentioned that I had never had a baby shower, not with any of my kids. We tried to figure out why & it took me to today to fully understand the reasons. I’m okay with it now, it was mostly my fault, so I was able to let that go after all of these years & move on.

I need to go print some stuff for Dawn & eat some lunch, so I’d better get to that, since we’re having dinner over there tonight.

On Saturday, Dawn, Jason & I went down to Hurricane, Utah to visit their brand new medieval faire, which was called “Days of Camelot.” First, we had pretty high hopes for this particular faire, as they had some pretty impressive corporate sponsorship & it was being put on by the group that does a festival called “A Dickens Christmas.” (or something like that) The gate fee was $10 a person or $25 for a family with $1 for parking, the parking lot had a lot of cars in it and there seemed to be a lot of people milling around.

I was disappointed to see that the Guild area was completely apart from everything else, which, in my opinion, isn’t a great choice as they tend to add most of the color to a faire and offer demonstrations for the patrons to stay & watch, but if you have them located right at your entrance, people pass over them & rarely go back to see what they were doing.

We entered the first building & I immediately felt like we were at any other craft faire in the world. None of the vendors in that area were wearing garb (costumes to the uninitiated) or selling anything but modern wares, nor were any of them even making an attempt to act like they were at a medieval faire. It was very disappointing & I was happy, at that point, that I had free passes to the event & hadn’t spent money to get in the gate.

The vendors in the food court were doing a better job at portraying the medieval era & they were selling a great variety of delicious looking & smelling food items. By this time, Jason was ready to sit for awhile, so we found the hay bales over by the stage & sat down. Sadly, the entertainment was pretty much all modern & not very well done. They did have a roving entertainer, but his fake accent was so badly done & the voice was so jarring that we almost ran from him.

There were more booths outside & those were the period vendors. They were dressed in garb & the booths were nicely decorated. The wares they were selling were much better suited to the theme of the faire & we felt more in our element, although the entertainment was still modern & terrible. They did have some fun looking rides & games, which is always a large draw to the public. We wandered around out there for awhile, found a few vendors that we were interested in & collected their cards and talked with most of them.

After awhile we decided that it was time to eat & went in to decide what we wanted. Dawn & I were pretty sure we wanted to have a gyro, and there were two booths to choose from. Jason & Justin (Dawn’s son) went to the first one, and Justin got a kebob, which looked delicious, but somewhat skimpy, and Jason got an Iitalian sausage sandwich. We were going to get our gyro there, but there were out of feta & tomatoes & weren’t selling them right then, so we moved on to the other one.

I swear, I should have taken an appetite suppressant before we went, because we got a huge gyro for $8 & I ate the whole thing like it was my last meal on Earth. It was so delicious! We later got an elephant ear & split it between the 4 of us, and then we went home.

So, while it wasn’t a great faire, we had a fun time & it was free for us to get in. I hope they learn from the mistakes that were made this year & attempt to make it better next time. If not, I doubt that I’ll be going again.

I’ve pretty much not gotten anything finished that’s on my list so far this week. So, I’m going to talk about my plans for each one & when I intend to get them done.

1. Print package inserts. I’ll be working on these this afternoon sometime, if not, then in the morning, for sure.
2. Design & print bottle labels. These are designed, I’ll be buying the sticker paper I need today, as soon as Dawn calls me & tells me her check is in.
3. Label bottles. As soon as I print the labels.
4. Package oils & perfumes. Buying a stapler & more card stock for the bag tags this afternoon sometime, so as soon as the labels are printed & the bottles are labeled, I’ll start on this.
5. Work on incense list. Probably not until this weekend sometime. Maybe Friday or Sunday.

I also want to try to find a lockable box at the store today with a cash drawer that separates the bills into denominations. I think that’ll make things a lot easier during faire itself. I have asked a friend of mine for the wood for my displays & he’ll bring that to me on Saturday or Monday night, I think.

Dawn, Jason & I have plans to attend a faire south of here on Saturday, to take some fliers down & check out the entertainment and such. There are big changes on the horizon for our little faire & we’re trying to get a jump on them. I can’t disclose what’s going on at the current time, but trust me, it’s big & for us, exciting & scary at the same time.

Play along!

1) Which person have you taken the most advantage of? I’m not really someone who takes advantage of people, it’s just not my nature, but I would say Troy (even though he would disagree) or my parents (and they would disagree, too)

2) When was the last time you went to a carnival and played midway games? At least 10 years, if not longer. We took the kids to the end-of-school carnival once or twice back then, but it was never a regular thing because it always fell on the weekend that was between our payday.

3) If you could rid your family of one thing, what would it be? My brother’s alcoholism.

4) Show and Tell. What comes to mind first when you see this picture? Or, tell a story if it reminds you of one. (it was a picture with a white background & pink veiny looking stuff) I automatically thought of a 60s or 70s era bathroom counter top. I’m sure that at least one place I’ve lived in had one that looked just like that.