California

Ok, so it's been a while again since I wrote last. I never was a good journal-keeper. I'd write faithfully for days, even weeks sometimes, and then it would be once a week for a while, then once a month or so... Then I'd think to myself, "What's the point now??" Yeah, good to know that things don't really change, even 25+ years later.

So the main reason I haven't been active lately is because I was in California for a few days for work. One of the things like I like best about my job is the opportunity I have a couple of times a year to be a buyer for the store. We travel to whatever city happens to be hosting the Craft & Hobby Association tradeshow to check out what new products the scrapbooking and crafting manufacturers have to offer us for the upcoming season. (Kind of like Fashion Week, only with paper and stickers - definitely still just as glamourous, trust me!) Then we spend as much money as we can manage in a matter of 36 hours or so. It is HARD work (you're just going to have to trust me), but also a lot of fun. We walk MILES over the course of the day, we barely see the outdoors (at least not during daylight hours), we typically eat lousy convention center food (if we eat at all), and we work into the wee hours of the morning - just to get up EARLY and do it again the next day, and the next... Until we're done. It can be brutal. It has been brutal.

This trip, however, was an exception to this rule. Julie, Jeri and I arrived in Anaheim, California on Saturday afternoon, and the weather was spectacular. Sunny, almost 80 degrees, and palm trees. The cab driving us from the airport to our hotel had the windows down and it felt fabulous! (and those of you who know me well understand how unusual that is!) We, of course, dumped our belongings, didn't even stop to go to the bathroom, and hit the ground running. We always spend the first night attending VIP events and receptions, and this trip was no different. Cranked out orders for a couple of our bigger vendors and called it a night - by only 9:30-ish, so we grabbed a late dinner (very late, considering it was past midnight our time).

The nice thing about the shows in California is that Pacific Time feel VERY good to someone like me. I'm a night owl. My ideal schedule would include sleeping from 1 or 2am until about 10 or 11am. So when we get up at 7:30 to get ready to go, it's like I've slept until 10:30 and I still feel GREAT! Of course, that really only works the first day or two and then you're on CA time, but it's still much easier than traveling EAST!

We spent our first full day as normal - racing from booth to booth to collect catalogs and order forms, see new product, take pictures, hear about show specials, and place the occasional order (we only do certain ones on the first day). We've got this process down pat. We're a well oiled machine. By the end of day Sunday, we had every catalog from every scrapbooking vendor at the show. We then left the convention center (in the dark) and took everything with us to dinner and worked around courses. We stayed until they basically ushered us out, then we found a table in the hotel bar (which was also closing) where they'd let us camp out until we were done. Each of us pulls from the stash of catalogs and proceeds to decide what we do and don't want to buy, will it sell, how much of it we can sell, if there's anything else out there like it, which is the better choice, etc, and then fill out the order form. It's a VERY tedious process, but again, exciting at the same time.

We had been lamenting the fact that the weather had been SO nice all day (or so we'd heard) and we hadn't even seen a minute of it, so we made the decision as a group to do whatever it took to get done as early as humanly possible the next day, possibly allowing us to leave the building while the sun was still shining. That meant staying up until every catalog had been poured over and every possible order form was filled out. Turned out that we hit that milestone at about 3:30am (6:30 our time - in fact, I got a text message from a South Bend news station that school was closed for the day, and I hadn't even gone to bed yet!). The girls went to bed and I finished up the computer side of things (posting pictures to our store's flickr account, posting on the store's blog to inform customer's to check out the pictures, and sending out an email for the store) until about 4:30-ish. Again, brutal (though the 3 or 4 Mountain Dews with dinner definitely helped), but worth it to walk into the 2nd day of the show so far ahead of normal.

Monday was spent dropping off orders and taking more pictures, but we finished early - a record for us - at about 2:30pm. We immediately raced back to the hotel, dumped our stuff and headed straight for the pool! We actually laid in the sun, poolside, for about 30 minutes - until the sun dipped below the Hilton across the street. It was the most spectacular sensation. Keep in mind, our kids had been home from school DUE TO BITTER COLD, BELOW ZERO TEMPS, and where we were it was literally 100 degrees warmer! I almost felt guilty. Almost.

We tied up some loose ends on Tuesday - didn't get done as early as we'd hoped - and spent another 20 minutes in the sun before our car came to pick us up to take us to the airport.

Some other highlights/memorable moments from this trip: the omelets, "we're hot, in California, in the dark", Julie's unusual walks, Jeri and the pump, delayed flights, a cancelled flight, the curb outside O'Hare, getting home a day late, the walk to the convention center, and many more.

Enjoy some more pictures from the trip!