Wednesdays

Wednesday nights my husband plays darts. That's his sport. Really. He's in a league and his team is actually doing quite well in the end-of-season tournament. It's not the Stanley cup, but he's pretty excited. He works with women all day so one night a week is really his testosterone fix. He's off throwing darts and drinking a beer or two and I stay home and luxuriate in a bit of quiet time. Sometimes I make stuff. Sometimes I watch t.v. Sometimes I do work. Tonight I watched 'Miracle on 34th Street' and played with felt and now I am (supposed to be) working. Pretty soon I may pour myself a glass of wine and fill the tub up with hot water and read fashion magazines. Don't be jealous. I know how fabulous this sounds and there is laundry and a letter to write and a big pile of beads on my desk that need to arrange themselves into comely jewelry and a nice pile of letters to read and respond to waiting on my laptop. Hmm, I think the bath wins.

business travel with a baby

Well, from time to time I go about the world procuring beads and sundries for the stores. I haven't gone much of anywhere since Nora was born and I only made a couple of trips while I was pregnant with her so I am very in need of some travel. Well, actually, we need the beads, right now I could do without the travel. I was hoping to not go but then I realized that if I don't go now, Miss Nora will be crawling in a few months and then it will only get harder. Right now, she sits up and lays down and that's it. She stays where you put her. She is happy to be in my sling for hours on end.

So off I go, in two weeks, on a bead buying trip. The very intrepid Jane will accompany me and Nora, which means that not only will she be busy doing work she will be called upon to hold Nora and maybe even make a funny face or two. We'll cram ourselves on a plane, in cabs and in the same hotel room for four nights. There won't be much night life, at least for me. There will be food brought in to the hotel room and watching HBO with the sound turned down low. Actually, that doesn't sound too bad!

We'll be looking at new beads from old suppliers and at a couple of new suppliers. We are trying to find a good, reliable resource for stone donuts that sells them by the kilo. I am hoping to find some nice Chinese foil beads, and we'll look for more carved shapes of bone and horn (which I can't get enough of) and maybe some new wood styles. We'll see pearls, fancy stones, man-made stones, glass beads, wood, shell, you name it. By the end of the week Jane and I will both be dreaming about beads whether we want to or not. Nora will probably be dreaming about beads, but I guess we'll never know.

I am still not eager to travel now, just before Christmas, but off I go. I will miss Cleo and Galen terribly and will be further behind in my endless list of projects. Maybe I can do a bit of crafting while we watch HBO on the sly in that hotel room...