Laffing Horse Crafts

…another $.37 after taxes.

Work is work, but some days are, well, different. Today was one of those days.

I went in early because I was told to. Today we were to adjust the press to correct the circumventials. However, my boss showed up at his usual time.

We still got the work done and, as this was my first time doing this, it was a fascinating process. The cylinders that hold the plates will, over time, shift a little. We have circumventials to make corrections as needed, but these were maxed out and needed to be re-centered.

That was job one…

Then, in spite of all the planning, the job that never shows up on time showed up on time and the job that we had scheduled for their normal time slot, complete with a tour of high school students, showed up at about the same time. This is the crew, however, and nothing slowed us down. I conducted the tour while my co-workers ran the first job and in short order, we had the second job with the tourists watching run off as well.

The last job of the day was also on time and I got to come home at a reasonable hour.

Nice!

We’ll have to see what tomorrow brings… It’s always never the same.

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We were uncertain how many people would show up to our open house. When I asked Jeanette what she thought, she said between 10 and 400.

We had advertised in the three local newspapers, a color advertisement with an offer of a free product with any purchase, for two weeks prior. We did forget to put the notice on the website, though. We told a lot of people by word of mouth. We handed out flyers at the last show we did (Pine Creek High School Crafts Fair in Black Forest, CO).

I had no clue, either.

And so we prepared for about 100.

About 14 people showed up.

But that’s not bad. In fact (and this might be looking for a silver lining on a dark cloud) it was very good because they were all previous customers. To me, this speaks of customer loyalty. To give up a day in the middle of Christmas shopping season and miss all the electronic gadgets on sale at ridiculously low prices to come and visit a fiber farm and studio… Furthermore, most of them came from way out of town because they had seen us or met us or taken lessons from us at another place like the Colorado Renaissance Festival or Table Rock Llamas or the Pine Creek Crafts Show or… One came halfway across the state and chose to camp in our yard in November rather than miss this event.

I’m happy to know we have devoted, loyal customers.

Thanks!

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No turkey comes down the chimney. There is no great turkey, Charlie Brown. No one dresses up as a pilgrim and goes door to door soliciting turkey dinners. No fireworks.

What is it all about, then?

Football? Watching big men attempt to clobber each other in order to move an inflated pigskin from one end of a pasture to another? Nah.

Food? Stuffing yourself until you’re too uncomfortable to move with any grace and all you can think about is a nap? Not in my book.

Another day that the banks and government offices are closed? Nope.

Poring over advertisements in the newspaper to find the best deal to go to at 5 a.m. or some other ungodly hour in the morning to rush to beat the crowds (as if) to get the best deal? Not on your life.

Are we actually celebrating just another year of surviving? That’s what the pilgrims did and they selected a special day to give thanks to God. Then the government came along and said, ‘Good idea. Take the day off while you’re at it.’ Too bad that’s not the case anymore.

The only answer that I can come up with now that I’ve eliminated all of those is friends and family.

For the friends I have and the family I have I am very thankful indeed.

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Happiness is where you find it, right?

I don’t know if where I found it tonight is a sad statement of affairs or not…

I’ve been working on a website for the longest time and I have been having some real problems with it. I discovered how really and truly bad Internet Explorer is about handling CSS and DHTML and anything not MS specific. I also found other browsers with the same problem. I also discovered that no matter how many times a person reads the documentation, there’s some eensy-teensy thing that will be overlooked in the first twenty-seven readig that will cause the entire project to fail miserably.

But tonight, I discovered the solutions to many an error and the website I was working on is, by and large, finished. Just gotta drop in a few little details…

That has made me very happy.

Sad? Naw…

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