Well, the festival is over for another year…and all the stuff has been packed up, hauled home, and yesterday, hauled back to Sue’s store. I sold many fleeces and some other things. It was a reasonably successful day financially on Saturday; Sunday was not very lucrative. Mostly Sunday was people out to the fair, not fiberholics…
There were some great fleeces there. Two I was particularly impressed by. One was a romney, from a sheep belonging to a 4Her, a beautiful silver grey…but I didn’t have $70! The other was a 3/4 blue face leicester-1/4 cormo fleece, the most incredible thing, like ringlets, long stapled, very clean, priced for doll makers at $156 for 4 lb. and some oz. I didn’t have $156 either!
The New Hampshire festival is always good because it’s the first big one in New England since fall, which means catching up with people you only see at fairs. Some had good winters, one had a very sad winter, having to put her parents in a nursing home, losing a daughter to cancer, having to quit her job to nurse her daughter for several months…very sad.
There was the usual assortment of serious fleece people, serious sheep people, bargain hunters, people with no intention of buying anything, but who fingered all the fleece and pulled it apart. It reminded me of my favorite retailing story…friend, Donna, taking a break from nursing, many years ago, worked in the fabric department of a big store. Along with the bolts of fabric were two big table of neatly folded pieces of fabric. Every morning, Donna came in and made sure the fabric was neatly stacked. ONe morning a woman came in, picked up one length of fabric, held it up, and then dropped it on the floor. After doing this with about 10 pieces of fabric, Donna was getting a little irritated, as was her co-worker. After a few more, Donna went over to the woman and said, “Let me help you,” and with her arm, pushed the whole table full of fabric to the floor. I wish I had been there to see the look on the customer’s face…I laughed and laughed and laughed. Sometimes I’m tempted to do the same thing when people mess up stuff in my booth with no regard for the work that goes into it or the need to NOT pull apart an entire fleece just for experience, with no intention to buy.
Back home to find my stupid husband had two ticks on him since Friday, and not bothering to put on his glasses to check out his “black fly bites” only asked me on Sunday to check them out…Long story short, he’s on antibiotics, they were deer ticks. I suggested to him that it was time to visit his eye doc when he couldn’t tell a tick from coagulated blood. Hopefully, he got the antibiotics in him in time to prevent lyme disease…GRRR!!! Now, of course, he’s a tick-nut…this morning he had a little bump on his face for me to check…an issue perhaps for his dermatologist next week, but not a tick.
I still have not begun digging plants for our annual plant sale, but it has blessedly been put off a week, as Dottie has a wedding on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend…So, we’ll do it the following week. Which is wonderful, since I have the Mass. Sheep festival on Memorial Day weekend each year, and can’t help her on Saturday. This way I can be there the whole two days. And perhaps, since a nearby town has had a town wide Memorial Day sale the last few years, which has cut down on our traffic, having it the following week would be better anyway. So, I have another week to dig.
This week I have two major chores: empty my “office” (sewing room?) of everything so John can paint, stain, varnish it in the next week to 10 days, And spread the fertilizer around the pasture…I’ve started emptying the room. I have 8 boxes of stuff, and have only emptied one cabinet…argh…it’s going to be a major deal, I think. The fertilizing will wait til later in the week. While he’s staining and varnishing, I will have to make myself scarce, since that stuff gives me violent headaches and intestinal difficulties. Allergies are such fun.
We heard from HomeAtFirst yesterday. They are processing our papers and about to send out our airline tickets, etc. The farm sitters are all set to come. We leave June 12th for a week in Tipperary, Ireland and a week after that in Yorkshire. WE are both looking forward to it; I’ve been planning it for months, with lots of options for each day, depending on how well recovered my knee is, etc. I still have ferry reservations (waiting for them to get back to me) to make, and he still has Dartmouth Coach tickets to buy to get us to Boston, and I want the house all clean and orderly before the farm sitters arrive. Lizzie will be staying with neighbors she knows real well; I think that will be better for her. She knows the farm sitters a little, but…they will have enough to do with the animals and gardens and such.
I had debated bringing my computer and doing a trip travelogue, but I think that’s just one more thing to worry about and a pad and pencil are lighter, so I think I won’t bring the computer.
Time to load up some boxes…have a great week.
