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.

There are so many things I need to do today & I just don’t have the get up & go to start on anything. I came home from camping this morning, brought in what was necessary & promptly took a nice long nap, so it’s not that I’m tired, I just don’t seem to care today.

Troy took the camping gear to storage after I got up & brought the mail back, and with it news that I didn’t want to hear & so I’ve been a little down all afternoon. I’m sure that plays a huge part in why I have no ambition now. I’ll get over it & move on with a new plan, but for today, I intend to let myself feel the sadness & disappointment.

I also kind of feel like I just don’t know what to do next, I don’t know which incenses we can afford to make, or what we can afford to buy wholesale at this point, so I just sit here & waver back & forth between ideas & things that I think maybe i ought to be working on. I wish I could take a pill & have the answers, but they don’t make fat loss pills for the brain or brain fog.

I just feel like screaming sometimes. Do you think it will help?

I guess I’ll switch to the other computer & do some printing, so at least, I can start getting all of that taken care of & out of the way. It’s not getting done any other way, and doesn’t take that much to get done.

1. Print package inserts.
2. Design & print bottle labels.
3. Label bottles
4. Package oils & perfumes.
5. Work on incense list.
6. Secure Outer Banks rentals and run away.

I really need to either design another large package insert to print myself or go ahead & order another package of the ones I had printed, because, at this rate, we don’t have enough. I also need to come up with the money to order more bottles for the other oils that need bottling. I feel like we’re running out of time & I’m running out of money & everything we wanted to do this year just may not get done, after all. I don’t need the added stress, that’s for sure.

I’m actually not running away to the Carolinas, but right now I’m sad, frustrated and disappointed over things I can do nothing about & certainly feel like running away.

Time for the mid-week progress report, even though I never posted at to do list on Sunday.

1. All of the oils are finished, 37 are bottled. I need to order more dram bottles for the other 15.
2. The perfumes are finished & bottled.
3. I’m in the process of printing bag inserts.
4. Will start making labels for bottles today.

This weekend we’ll be camping, so I’ll sit down with Dawn & we’ll work on taming the incense recipes to fit what we can afford to do & go through the catalog for the company I wholesale through & decide what we can afford this time.

I need Troy to call the people who are making the top & walls for my EZ-up & make sure they’ll still have a chance to do that for me & if not, I’ll need to figure something out. He also needs to make a decision about our encampment so I’ll be able to plan accordingly for our walls.

Play Along!

1.) What are your least favorite sounds? Wow, probably anything repetitive or kids screaming.

2.) Do you enjoy reading infidelity blogs? Why? If you don’t, is there any reason why you don’t? No. They make me angry, because I feel like if you want to have sex with someone outside of your relationship, you need to end it & then do that.

3.) If you could make one frivolous purchase right now without expense being an option, what one thing would you go buy? A huge wholesale order to stock my renne faire booth.

4.) Have you ever gotten drunk and then gotten behind the wheel to drive? I used to do that all the time when I was a teen. After I started having kids I never did it again & can’t believe I was so reckless & stupid as to have done it back then.

5.) As an adult, have you ever been caught having sex by someone you didn’t ever want to catch you in the act? Yes & it was pretty embarrassing.

6.) If your current significant other wound up in jail for no less than 5 years but didn’t kill or physically harm anyone, would you wait for them or move on? We’ve been together for 18 years, I want to be with him for the rest of our lives, so of course I’d wait for him.

7.) If you had to participate, would you rather be in a mud wrestling competition or a JellO wrestling competition? A Jello-O wrestling competition, that stuff ends up in your mouth & I’d rather have that than mud.

Well, that week passed with minimal updating, which wasn’t my intention, so I think while I wrap up my week, I’ll try to catch up on what I had planned to post about, at least in some cases.

Last weekend, we (thought) finished 37 different ritual oils, and they’re ready for bottling (they aren’t actually). We only have 15 left to do & hopefully, we can do that this weekend at some point. Anyway, here are some pictures:

These are the jars, boxed up after we finished.

A small selection of what we made; Astral Travel, Earth, Air, Moon, Hecate, Pan, Aries, Peace, Energy & Healing. Obviously, there are many more.

And my progress on that to do list I posted on Sunday:

1. 10am Faire Meeting (I think, we need to check on this)
2. Check shipping on bottles to make sure they’ll be here Monday.
3. Bottle the 37 (!) types of oils we have finished.
4. Print package inserts for oils.
5. Print labels for oils.
6. Make bag tags for the oils.
7. Order more droppers.
8. Decide on incense blends
9. Buy more Ziplock bags for droppers & bulk storage of finished products.
10. Finish the last 15 oils.

I’ll buy ziplocks today or tomorrow, but can’t print anything until we replace my stupid printer. I also need to get some cardstock for the bag tags, but will do that tonight.

I have my wholesale account setup with my distributor & am ready to go on that, we just need to decide what we can afford to get before faire & what we want to wait on until after this season. It’s been a productive week & an exciting one. I’m thrilled with the direction we’re taking & the plans we’re making.

I’ve been having problems with my desktop machine & it not wanting to stay connected to the ‘net. Funny thing about blogs, you can’t post if you can’t stay connected. So, we think we have it all ironed out, finally, and hopefully, tomorrow I’ll be back with my normal posts & the daily stuff I’ve been trying to keep up with on here.

I have progress pictures to post and things to talk about, even, but I’m just too headachey & tired to get into it right now.