*Walks in slowly and lies down*
Hi Mr. Blog. What a trip, I'm still beat. It is definitely a yawn festival story so grab a couch.
*Waits for Mr. Blog to lie down*
So last Thursday I got an e-mail from a teacher asking me to sub Friday and I told her I'd be out of town but available this week. I wake up excited to take off Friday morning and check my work website and she put me in to work that day! I freaked out and called my supervisor and she said not to worry that she'd find another sub. Whew.
I took off out of Kookmore around nine in the gloom and hit the ten o'clock AM ferry at Edmonds. I stayed in Terry's camper van since it's no fun to go upstairs alone. When I drove off the boat in the left lane I knew it would merge right and didn't see anyone in my mirror and almost nailed a little car in my blind spot! Can you say HEAD CHECK?! Ugh! Embarrassing.
I just "followed my mail" along my memorized route through the storm and was happy to see the sign for my favorite road, called, "Chickencoop Road." Isn't that the cutest road name ever?
Right after that I crossed into Clallam County so of course it stopped raining and was clear as a bell in Sequim. It is in the rainshadow of the Olympic Mountains like Camano Island.
The minute I got out of Sequim it started that light drizzle and I was surprised to look over and see the snow on Hurricane Ridge looked almost to my level! The most common signs along there are "Elk Crossing." We went up there a long time ago and saw them!
So I cruised slowly into Port Angeles and went into McDonalds and had coffee to perk up.
I carefully followed the confusing highway 101 signs that wind around through town until I saw the Dazzled By Twilight store. I parked and went in and saw life-sized cardboards of Jacob and Edward as well as the 'So The Lion Lay Down With The Lamb poster.' I had just enough credit between my two cards for the ninety dollars for all three but I knew that they would be teen magnets and draw teens to my booth. The lady at the store was so warm and friendly!
If I had to describe the people in Port Angeles I would say, "The people in Port Angeles are so warm and friendly." Every single person I met all weekend was that way!
I cruised up the hill above town and scoped out places to camp in and around town until I found one I liked and then went into the school at about two PM.
I met Todd and Jodi and Lucy and Debbie from KNOP radio station, the sponsors of the show.
They were working like busy bees around a hive getting that enormous gym ready for the show with the booth building contractor! I hadn't followed Port Angeles high school sports before but they must have some of the best athletes in the state because they have not one, but two giant gyms the size of the Inglemoor high school gym! I was in the mezzanine of gym two where the risers for fans had been retracted against the wall and I looked at my two eighty pound suitcases of games and the two long flights of stairs and tried not to pass out from fright!
The kids were inside finishing whiffle-ball softball and as they came out to go to the dressing rooms I got up the courage to ask the hugest teen if he could carry one bag up the stairs for me.
He must have been 6'4" and 200lbs! I am not exaggerating. He just looked at me and said,
"Yes Ma'am." He picked up both and when I protested that one was enough he just kept jogging up the stairs like he was carrying sacks of feathers!
That was when I knew I was at the right show to be an old, single, wimpy lady!
After about two trips with tote-bags from my van up the mountain and up the two flights of stairs I was feeling buff myself. Like I never had to diet and exercise as long as I lived! The adorable, wonderful, awesome, fantastic, helpful, friendly DeMolay boys were running the espresso stand at the foot of my staircase and OFFERED to carry up the rest of my gear!!!
I had brought the comic books that Troy and Teddy were done with that my cousin Carolyn shipped them a few years back and planned to sell them for two bits each, but I told those great teenagers they could have any of them they wanted for free and free candy. They were so happy and all six found at least a half-dozen comics they liked. No good deed goes unpunished!
No one else was upstairs to set up the other booths so I just enjoyed the buzz from below as the big business sales reps set up all their booths. I saw Natasha, the vinyl window rep I met at the RV show and gave her a hello. Then I saw Lee from American Cookware and went down to visit with him for a bit. Man, if I ever make a dime I will so buy that American Cookware Waterless Cooking set! The Soroptimist that showed up in the booth next to me the next day said her American Cookware set was thirty years old and STILL looked brand new! I went to the next gym and said hello to Marshall and his sister Twyla of the vinyl siding company and then quit messing around and got to work. I climbed up on a chair and hung my giant yellow NIXPIX.COM sign up on the wall drape. I'm so glad I didn't throw that away when the City of Kenmore compliance officer made me take it down off my tree 'cause it looked smokin' hot in the zillion pictures taken over the week-end with my Twilight cardboard characters. Everyone just laughed so hard getting their pictures taken with Edward and Jacob and they loved putting their face through the hole of the 'So the Lion Lay Down With The Lamb' poster. I was careful when I spray-glued some of my sister's brown hair around the poster and the 3-D effect was awesome when they looked like Bella with Edward holding her so tenderly.
So it was around 9:30Pm when I finished my booth Friday night and I was dog-tired when I crawled in Terry's camping van. Talk about The Hilton On Wheels! That Ford van was perfect for me! It had a bed in the back and I had tons of flashlights to read my Harry Potter book and my cooler and my camping toilet and...Terry put a bit of hooch in a little flask for me so I wouldn't get cold. But the temperature did start dropping and around ten I could see my breath so I knew it was around forty. I got out my seven Kenmore Dollar Tree Store 4" pillar candles and put them in my big cake pan and lit them all and set them on a middle seat away from where they could catch anything on fire. After about an hour it warmed up to about fifty and I fell asleep. The only snag was Terry told me no one had slept in the double bag and I was all excited until I got in and it was full of sand! He had taken Troy and Teddy out to Neah Bay and forgotten that someone had used it but I was too tired to care and slept on top of it.
I did not want to get out of my five toasty sleeping bags the next morning, plus I was inside the soft double bag and I was pinned down from the weight of the rest of them that I had piled on top! Every time I stuck my hand out I said, "Brr!" and pulled it back in!!!
I finally roused myself and had my Cheerios and cranberry juice and got dressed.
Thank God for the Port Angeles Kiwanis! If they hadn't had coffee ready I might have started bawling and gone home right then. But they did so I got four cups and hiked up to my little piece of heaven.
It was around nine and I got all my receipts ready and games in their Monsteria leaf shopping bags. When I was visiting Brenny in Hawaii last year we stopped at the little store at the top of the hill on the way to the Hilo Botanical Gardens and I was looking for an official Nixpix necklace and was liking the round shell and she insisted on that Monsteria leaf necklace carved out of the black pearl oyster shell. Well, it wasn't as blingy, but I'm gaga over Monsteria plants and it was on a cool slip-knot adjustable cord so I let her spend four bucks on me and I've been wearing it ever since. I'm crazy over that necklace! So I knew I needed bags for the sacks and surfed the net at her house and found a close-out on...Monsteria print bags from The Pennsylvania Bag Company! Get this Mr. Blog-only $49.99 for 1,000!!! I love my bags!
When everyone showed up a few minutes later it was like Christmas morning!
I swear to God Mr. Blog that the entire town of Port Angeles came to that show!
It was like a giant party all day long and I never had so much fun in my life!
My first sale was to a great lady from Alaska that had just moved to PA and darned if she didn't have to take our driving test! Poor thing!!! Wonder how I could find every single new person moving to our state and sell them my game? That test is hard.
Some of the rules are the same and the traffic icons are coordinated but there are some slight variations that have been giving me kiniputions when I worked on the national version.
The next sale was to an adorable teen that was already driving and was gaga over the game and wanted to get it for her little fifteen year old sister. There were also some families that couldn't afford the expensive driving schools and they were happy when I showed them that I had carefully put the Department Of Licensing website links right on the gameboard to get to the parent guide that teaches parents step-by-step how to teach someone to drive based on the state curriculum. I had brought my copy that I made to teach Troy so they could see what it looked like and how I had just downloaded it to print and then hole-punched it and put it in a binder from the thrift store. It was embarrassing that I couldn't afford printer paper when I made it and used the back of Teddy and Troy's old school papers. At least they could see Teddy got As in penmanship and Troy did an awesome report on Bhutan!
Right after that the Swans of KNOP fame stopped by for my song and pony show. They were so nice and friendly and I had read all about them in the Home Show guide. I was probably the only person that had ever been to Idaho Falls where they got married forty years ago! When Mom and Lyle lived in Pocatello Idaho, a friend of their's took us on a sailboat ride at that lake!
So they were like the nicest people in the world and told me about a KNOP podcast that they do and I am surely going to listen to that. He had one of those deep baratone voices that is so soothing that your blood pressure comes back down if you drank too much coffee. They were so nice that I was even thinking about inviting myself to have dinner with them but I didn't have enough nerve to ask and figured they had a bunch of kids hanging out with them all the time. Friendly people like that are like social magnets that you just want to stick to.
My last and fourth sale of the day was to a dad with a fourteen year old son because his son and his little brother were liking the mini-racers and road on the gameboard and the spinner.
I never thought of it as a game for fun but when I subbed in third grade last year the kids were fighting over reading the driving manual of all things! People are so funny!
I just like how you can NEVER predict what they are going to do. When the show closed at five, I dashed down to give Marshall his birthday present. He was the vendor at the RV show that told me I HAD to come to PA with my game that it was the most fun show in the state.
I only had a few dollars so I went to the Kenmore Dollar store and got him so birthday horns and glow-in-the dark party stuff and kitchen towels. They have real cute kitchen towels.
He was happy I remembered and Twyla laughed and laughed and said they'd have fun with the stuff. I took a quick spin through the show and found out why the whole town turned out.
The vendors were so warm and friendly and gave all kinds of loot! Man! You should see the stuff I brought home! Pens, tablets, gardening gloves, keychains, a necklace, a Clallam County Sheriff's badge, a Smokey the Bear button... and they had hats too! But too small for my fat head. Oh, and the nice real estate people gave me a baby fir tree that I am going to plant out next to the bike trail where they installed an underground sprinkler system and when it gets a little bigger I'm decorating it for Christmas like I used to do my old tree. When I taught kindergarten at Springtime Day Care Center in 1996, I brought my entire class down for a Martin Luther King junior day field trip and we planted the live tree I had bought for our classroom during a monsoon along the bike trail. I decorated it every year, even when I had to drag out the ladder, but when they did the highway 522 improvements they had to kill it last summer and it was fifteen feet high. I mean, I doubt Lisa Pierce or Lolly Borte or Jeffery Possetter or the other kids would even remember doing it anyway. But I remember all those kids. They were so terrific that I started college to teach kindergarten in the public schools.
Oh, and I met the nicest lady from the transit center! She told me all about taking the bus from Kenmore out to PA and if I win the drawing for a bus pass I am so going to do it! I love PA.
When I got back upstairs the Soroptimists were done for the day and came over and took pictures with Edward and Jacob and we just laughed our heads off! I'm laughing inside just remembering how much fun I had with them all week-end. They were hands down the nicest civic group people I had ever met. And Jeri even printed a copy of herself with Edward and Jacob on her lunch break that I hope I find at some print. It is SO CUTE! What a living doll.
After everyone left I went down and hung out with Lee cause he always has a ton of clean-up after his cooking show. He showed me his LED light that was the next company he is sales-repping and asked me if I was interested. I love to sell and I'm still pondering his offer. I also like the environmental impact that LEDs can help the world with. He wrapped up around seven so I went to my van and fell asleep after one page of Harry Potter! Well, I shook the damn sand out of that soft Coleman double sleeping bag first!
I woke up at seven and was so homesick I could have died! I jumped out of my nest and dressed in a heart-beat and pre-packed in five minutes and raced up to my booth and dragged out my giant suitcases and hauled them to the van. I got as much stuff I wouldn't need and was ready to go home. Only snag was I had to work until four. Jonathon from Solar ? was the only one there and he told me all about solar panels, which is something I'm highly interested in.
I had zillions of tweens come through that day and they all took pictures with this new invention called a camera phone. My rotary pal, Austin, had told me these shows were mostly about making contacts and publicity and that gave me an idea. I made the picture takers stand so my sign was behind them! He was such a card!
Now I find cell phone users to often be annoying and don't want one and couldn't afford one anyway, but the truth is they haven't designed one that a baby-boomer could use without reading glasses. The stupid designers make the screens black and print small but hey-they are probably only forty and don't know what is ahead for themselves. But those camera phones are starting to highly entice me after a week-end of seeing how they could not only take a picture, but someone send it to someone using a phone! Can you imagine that?!
Well, I was starving at one-thirty and who shows up, but Lee with a HUGE lunch of American Cookware waterless cooking vegetables and chicken! I was just about to run down for a few hot dogs too. I HATE BROCOLI AND CAULIFLOWER! But guess what? It tasted yummy with the way he made it AND the yams tasted like candy so I saved them for last for desert. Man, I was so grateful that when I do make a dime I'll only buy my set from Lee.
Around two o'clock a few Reporters from the Port Angeles Herald came around to look at the game and guess what?! You won't believe this, but they looked like Clark and Lois! They were so cute and friendly I wanted to take THEIR picture but decided I would embarrass myself more than my once daily quotient.
Right after that a charming lady named Carol stopped and got a game for her granddaughter. Then I remembered that several people had mentioned to me that the game would be perfect for the teens at the Boys and Girls club. I grabbed my demo and a game and ran down, down, down to their tent only to be blinded by...the sun. The view was so breathtaking that I forgot what I was doing. Once I recovered I showed them the game and they did buy one! I will so make a donation to the Port Angeles Boys and Girls Club when Gin Latin goes global!
At three I went downstairs for a pitstop and said hi to Lee and he said he was starting his next show but no one was sitting down yet. Well, I thought that the man that feeds me show was more important than sales so I plunked my butt right down in front. Soon more people came over and guess what? He had salads left from his previous show! He started his show with this vegetable spinner cutter that I would kill for!!! It is like 3oo clams or so. I try not to think about how much I want one of those but he did everything under the sun with it! Sliced potatoes and ridged chips and julienne squash. More people came and his chairs filled and I saw it was 3:40 and I hadn't started packing up yet. At 3:50, I dashed upstairs and the other five vendors were starting to pack cause the show ended at 4:00. I pre-packed under the table cause I know from chairing three arts and crafts fairs that shoppers that come late HATE it when vendors are breaking down before the scheduled.
Promptly at four I grabbed eight totebags and dashed down the stairs and asked my DeMolay pals for help. They all carried the bags to the van and I ran up for my two tables and sign and dragged them down the stairs. I attached them to my old flight attendant wheels from 1987, before rolling suitcases were invented and rolled it to my van. I threw everything inside and jumped in at 4:15 and rolled down into PA about 4:30. I carefully followed the signs back to the Kingston ferry and made it on the 6:30 right when it was starting to get dark. I was taking notes about my journey for you, Mr. Blog, when the captain came on the loudspeaker and said there was a rare harvest moon off the front of the ferryboat. I jumped out of the van along with a dozen other people and took a picture which looked like a crappy, blurry speck and laughed at my folly. But that giant orange moon looked like to me was a huge sign to me that said,
"WELCOME HOME GRETCHEN."
No comments:
Post a Comment