Dang. I’m so bored that I’m sitting here, watching Discovery ID, and looking up term life insurance quotes. Wow. What a busy and exciting day. Not. The cats are pretty funny to watch, at least Kaji & Booger are. Lucky gets mad if any of the other animals come near him, or pretends to, at any rate. Booger is in the window, on a tiny ledge, trying to catch her tail & keeps slipping, nearly falling, but then catching herself with the curtain.

I need to be figuring out what I’m taking to the potluck tonight, but I’m all out of ideas at this point. Maybe I’ll just buy some potato salad & macaroni salad & take that. I’ve really gotten to where I almost dread cooking, which is probably a bad sign, or not good at any rate.

I haven’t mentioned the most amusing visitor to our booth this season, yet. We were sitting there on Thursday or Friday, it was late afternoon. Erin was in the booth with Dawn & I. This teen boy & his mother came up & started looking around. Shortly after, he asked if we had any Ouija boards & as Dawn was saying, “No,” Erin was muttering “Did you want some broomsticks & toadstools, too?” under his breath. I was chuckling already when he asked if we had any “real magic stuff.” Dawn told him we had some tarot boxes & portable altar boxes but that was about it. He started his list of stuff he was looking for: wands, curses, love spells, potions (for everything from healing to acne cures) and a bunch more. Justin pointed to another booth & told him to look there, because they sold that sort of thing.

That was probably the most ignorant “customer” we’ve ever had & his mother was mortified. I have no idea why she didn’t stop him, but she never really tried.

I have a friend that just bought a house (I’m pretty sure she got an online mortgage, which is too cool) on some property. There’s a big shop there, too that she’s letting us use for our troth & it’s various gatherings, classes and so on. We’re kind of in the process of getting it all ready to be used & there is some decorating going on and some building and all of that, I was thinking about taking a couple of my signs out there & donating them to the troth. One of them would be perfect for the outside & another would look good somewhere in a class area, I think. I really need to find out where she lives so I can take a few things out there & let them start getting used.

Other than that, I really need to get the craft room straightened up again so I can use it for whatever I plan to use it for. Right now, I need to head out to the living room, because Erin is coming over to see me.

I’m not happy these days. I don’t get what’s going on in my group of friends right now & I feel terribly alone and empty. I had thought everything was working out, but I still feel it today, so I know it’s still bothering me. I can’t take this kind of stress.

I’m also frustrated with my daughter right now. She keeps calling in sick at her job & just doesn’t seem to be getting that she has rent to pay, but its 100% okay with her to keep coming over here & asking us to buy her things. I don’t mind helping her out when I know she’s working, paying her bills and rent & just having a hard time making ends meet, but I resent the hell out of her not working & expecting us to provide whatever she wants anyway.

I also don’t know what to do about my booth & faire next year, I have a hard time keeping track of everything that sells. I’m no expert in corporate performance management, but it feels like I do a lot more work figuring things out, making stuff to stock the booth & everything else than anyone else does. I just don’t really know what to do anymore, I’m seriously considering not running it next year.

It seems like anymore, Sunday is really the only day I’ve been getting to sleep in. There always seems to be something going on the rest of the week that I need to get up for, but Sunday morning is still safe. So far.

My dad had his consultation with the oncologist on Friday, I haven’t heard from my mom about how that went, so it must have been more of the same. He’ll start his rounds of chemotherapy soon & then it’ll be my turn to sit with my grandma while they’re gone. It’s heartbreaking to see her this way, so fragile and out of her mind most of the time. For all of the years after my grandpa died from mesothelioma until about 4 years ago, she was self-sufficient. She took care of her home, visited with her friends and handled all of her own business. Then she got sick, her osteoporosis took a turn for the worse & we started noticing a huge personality shift. We just put it down to old age for a long time, but in the past year, we have come to accept that it’s Alzheimer’s & had that verified by her doctor. If we had pulled our heads out of the sand years ago, we might have been able to have managed her symptoms with medication a lot better & she might not be as far along. Now, it’s too late & all we can do is clean up the messes & try to convince her that an airplane didn’t crash in the back yard, no matter how real it seems to her.

I guess what I’m trying to say, is that if your loved ones aren’t acting like themselves, and are displaying unusual anger, depression or memory loss, please get them to the doctor, get a diagnosis & find out what’s really going on. I wish we had, it might have been easier on my parents that way.

There’s one really good thing about spending all day, every day for a week out in the sun. It cleared up all of my adult acne. I know it’s not good for my skin, so please no lectures. I hate sun block & the way it feels on my skin, so I never remember to put it on. Fortunately, I had enough of a base tan this year that I didn’t get sunburned, except my cheeks on the first day.

It was weird, I had a lot of money to spend this year, I just didn’t find that much that I wanted. I traded in the bodice I bought last year, for one that actually fit me (the old one was two sizes too big), bought one more & bought a silver medallion that I had stamped with a couple of symbols (the Celtic pentagram & a fox). Besides a bit of food, that’s all I bought. Today, on the other hand, I plan to buy a video camera & some new clothes, so it’s all even in the end.

Sorry I haven’t been around the past week, it was, after all, faire week. I noticed this morning that this blog is throwing an error, so I’ll need to try to get that fixed at some point today or tomorrow, as I find time to do it. Faire was good, we had the stage built & ready to be painted before sundown on Monday, which has got to be a record. It was completely finished by about 3 or 4 the next day, if not sooner. Our encampment was up and ready way before then, as was our booth, so we had a really good setup.

I had a pretty steady flow of customers, but didn’t sell very much bath salt at all, so I won’t even be selling it next year. I’m not sure that I’ll do much soap, either, maybe just the soap by the slice stuff, or I’ll slice it up & package it. I do need to make some Dragon’s Blood for a regular customer of mine, but other than that, I’m not going to put much effort into that. The signs sold fairly well, so I’ll do them again, but maybe I’ll do more pirate sayings than I did this year, they seemed to be the most popular.

On Wednesday night, someone broke into a vendor’s trailer & stole about $400 (that’s their cost & not the resale value) worth of stuff & they didn’t have enough left to sell to earn gas money back home, so another vendor took up a collection from the rest of us for them. I felt really badly for them, that kind of thing used to never happen at our little faire.

Friday night we had a huge storm, with wind gusts up to 70mph & heavy rain. I thought for awhile that I had lost all of my soap & bath salts, but we managed to save everything with minimal damage. There were a couple of vendors that had to leave the next morning, because they either lost their actual booth or their merchandise wasn’t in condition to sell anymore. We agreed first thing Saturday morning not to hold our costume contest and of course, there had to be a jerk that raised a ruckus & started threatening to sue us over it and a bunch of other garbage. He “came all the way up here” to watch the thing, by the way, and was furious that we had “no good reason” for canceling it & couldn’t understand why every member of the board had a different reason for not wanting to hold it, so he assumed we were all lying. We weren’t, we all had very different, very valid reasons.

We got to talk to several people we don’t get to see that often, which is always nice. They all have triumphs and trials to talk about & it’s great to see how big the kids are all getting & the new additions, too. One of my friends was having problems getting their oldest child insurance, because they couldn’t prove that he was the father, and were having to save up to pay for DNA testing or some nonsense like that. I just think that’s ridiculous, especially since Troy always managed to keep our kids insured & he has no proof that they’re his.

Saturday afternoon, another storm started blowing in, so most of the vendors shut down early & started tearing down. We waited it out for a little while & then joined them. The stage was down & loaded along with everything else by 9:45 & we were off the park by 10. All in all, it was a good faire & we all had a pretty good time.

Things just haven’t gone like they should have this week, honestly. We ended up having to help Dawn, Jason, Blake & Melissa move, with a couple of days notice & 4-5 days to get it done. All of the kids who live or stay in that house spent the week bickering & fighting, which really grates on the nerves after the 25th time. Troy got upset by somethings that he found in Dawn’s daughter’s room & we had a terrible time getting it all sorted out, but we did. I wasn’t able to really help out over there for more than a day, because I’m still trying to get everything finished & ready to go for faire. That hasn’t been all that successful, either, I started freaking out because the walls aren’t even at one end, not stopping to think that Dave will take care of it while he’s hanging them up.

I knew that I was burning myself out & compromising my immune system, so I took yesterday off to just rest & relax & still ended up sick today. I’m so nauseated today that I can’t even think about food. At least now I can drink something, which was out of the question earlier. I still haven’t gone through my garb & decided what I’m wearing each day & repaired & cleaned everything, shoot, I don’t even have all of my jewelry rounded up & ready to go yet. I can’t do anything tomorrow, because we’re (me, Dawn & Melissa) are driving to Las Vegas to pick Dave up at the airport & that’ll take the whole day, and in the evening is drum circle, which I try to never miss. I guess I’ll put Troy to work on the house Sunday while I work on sewing, that way twice as much can get done.

I posted this on our troth’s forum & thought it was so much fun that I’d share it with all of you

Look to your left. Name 5 things you see. Rolls of ribbons in several different colors, a hand knitted wash cloth, a Pirates of the Caribbean sock, my Linksys router and a ladybug cell phone charm
Look to your right. Name 5 things you see. A Burger King Cup, some peppermint foot spray, nail polish remover, Sylver’s phone number, a little ceramic Witch boot.
Look at your desk/workspace. Name 5 things you see. A cup with my family crest on it, some pens, a Baltimore Ravens sticker, a cup full of sewing stuff, eye drops
Whats on your desktop? two dragons, black & white on a starfield nuzzling each other
Ok, now look out of the nearest window. Name 5 things you see. a dead tree, a live tree, a half dead tree, a cinder block wall, the sky
Name 5 of your favorite:
- books: Cell, Number of the Beast, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The Wyrd Sister, Carpe Jugulum
- movies: Con-Air, Water World, High Fidelity, The Replacements, We Are Marshall
- songs: Up All Night, Save Me, Ruby Soho, True Believers, Don’t Take me for Granted