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.