At last. Part II. If I can still remember any of it. I spent the day today thinking it was Wednesday, and Mom spent the day thinking it was Friday, so we averaged out at Thursday. And you expect me to remember weeks ago???
So when we last left our plucky Bead & Button teacher (that would be me,) it was Wednesday – Meet the Teacher’s Day. Also known as Beady Chaos & Nirvana Packed into One Ballroom for Three Hours Day. But it wouldn’t be as easy as just showing up. Nay! (I’m channeling Barbara Cartland here, folks, not braying like a horse.) I had to teach the 3rd of 4 Kumihimo classes from 4pm – 7pm, and the MTT event starts at 8pm. If you can do the math, that leaves just 1 hour between those two events, which is where Wonder Mom comes in. Having a Wonder Mom is a critical component of my success. She would be in charge of getting all the kits and display items set up in the ballroom since I was going to be tied up with my class. We also enlisted the assistance of my Austin friend, Gwen Youngblood. We knew it was going to be a doozy.
But wait! Where are the kits and display items, you might ask? Why they are all still tightly jammed into the car in the parking garage! So Wonder Mom managed to unload everything from the car, using one small dolly cart in a bazillion trips back and forth through the skywalk from the hotel parking garage to the convention center ballroom. Uphill a disturbing amount of the way. It’s not for the faint of heart. Honestly, when I think about it, it make me want to give her a raise.
My class took a while to pack up, and by the time I got to the Ballroom, the table was set up to the point of perfection, and I had ten minutes to assimilate. And then they let Them in. The Hoards. The Ladies. The ravenous bead buying public.
At that point it all becomes blurry in my mind. I remember people being 3-5 deep in front of our booth all night. I remember periodically looking up and seeing some of my wonderful bead world friends. I remember laughter and excitement and lots and lots of kits being sold. Our credit card machine wasn’t working wirelessly in the ballroom this year, so before long we had a do-it-yourself kind of checkout line going. Gwen would pull the kits for the ladies and hand them their merchandise. Then they would get into the cash register line which Mom was in charge of. If they paid by credit card, Mom would hand them their receipt and point them to me so I could write down their credit card info by hand. We won’t be playing that game next year! I will have it figured out how I can store all the credit card info in the machine even if it doesn’t connect, but it was literally too insane to stop and have me play with the menu to get it fixed. There might have been a riot.
The three hours was over in a flash. All of a sudden we looked up and it was over. The circus had left town, and all that remained was the broken down wreck of a crew. We still had to pack everything up and move it back upstairs to the Expo Hall so we could set up the booth on Thursday. Not the easiest of tasks since we had schlepped SO much stuff to the Ballroom. Next year, two carts for moving stuff around for sure. It was midnight before we dragged ourselves back to the room. I’m pretty sure we said OMG about way too many times. But OMG!
So I managed to drag that day out long enough to be a whole post of it’s own. Guess there’s a Part III in my future!