Real life intruded on my placid writer's existence last month. For those of you who don't know, I also run the family toy company,
Circle X Ranch. Normally, it is a rather passive mail-order operation, requiring me to tend eBay listings and use my ninja super-powers of wrestling things into boxes. I can pretty much look at your package and tell you the postage across three time zones. I recently had to replenish my shipping label supply, the 10,000 I had scored at an auction finally ran out.
But that is a story for another day. Last month I had to prep and attend a trade show. Not a huge one, but since it has been a while, I'd forgotten what show prep was like. I smugly thought, "How long could it take to pack the Terri-mobile?"
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| Turns out the Terri-mobile is like a Tardis, much bigger on the inside. |
A niblet of backstory. Last year a hail storm destroyed the roof of my warehouse. Mayhem ensued and moving was a necessity. So, I had to compact 4K sf into 800 sf. Boxes are piled to the rafters in my new shop. So, selecting stock for the show was like playing Tetris 3D in the life-size edition.
When you are getting ready for a show, your imagination gives you this picture:
However, reality usually looks more like this:
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| Gowanus Brookyn, Photog Unknown |
I finally made it to the show after two days of driving, some of it through biblical rainstorms, nearly killing a clerk at a motel worthy of a Stephen King novel, and discovering that combining really strong iced tea, B vitamin complex, and a muffin on a virtually empty stomach makes a worthy homemade meth substitute *twitch*
And luckily, the show was fairly successful, so the pack out was easier than the pack in . . .
Until I saw the flat tire . . .
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| A long weekend just got a bit longer. [Public Domain print, circa 1915] |
Luckily (again) I have the best friends ever and the temp donut was soon on my car and I had some choices for replace/repair. Less lucky, I got tourist-rolled at the tire place. It cost me a bit more than it should have, but my mechanic okayed the result when I got home, so I will replace the other tire in the pair with the same one before winter.
Bottom line, this is why I haven't blogged in the past few weeks. When I have a blogging break, it usually isn't because I am short of ideas, it is because I have so MANY ideas I can't contain them. Then my paranoid little mind wants to hoard them for the day when ideas don't come. Then I end up twitching in place like a robot who got a bad signal from its processors (or it could just be the iced tea - I swear, that was intense.) I'll go slow and get my groove back. Many good pics to come. I will be inflicting my thrift shopping, tea cups, strange signage, architecture oddities, and a few updates on my writing in the days and weeks to come. Thanks for hanging in with me.
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