What We Do While Visions of Sugarplums Dance in Your Heads . . .

Let’s face it.  For many of you, the night before the convention comes to town is like Christmas Eve.  You know who you are – you’re so excited that you can’t sleep, and you can’t wait to get the convention center on Saturday morning.  We spent all day Friday putting up the Christmas tree and loading up on the presents underneath (yeah, you have to pay for them, but work with me here). 

So what do we do after a long day of setup?  You’d be surprised.  Some vendors make plans to go out to dinner.  Others make trips to the local stamp store.  Still others go back to their rooms and work on their demos and make it/take its for Saturday.

We’re in Anderson, South Carolina this weekend.  And this time . . . some of us went bowling.

This is Ron Justison from The Paper Cut showing off his form.  Forgive the blurred photos – I was never very good at catching someone in motion, and the lighting in a bowling alley isn’t very good.

Here’s Melinda Doster – this weekend she’s demoing for Impression Obsession.  This outing was her idea.

And we had a cheering section, though some of them are a little camera-shy.  Left to right, Cindy & K.K. from Impression Obsession, and Duane Steines from Designs Unlimited.

But no pictures of me, as usual.  I was taking them.  If you look at the pictures and videos of my son when he was little, most of the time it looks like he had no father – because I was always behind the lens.  But you do get one shot that I’ll claim, along with the story behind it, which Melinda and Ron had me share with the peanut gallery.

This is one of my bowling shoes.  Pretty nondescript, though the stitching has worn through on the sole and it’s beginning to separate.  What makes these shoes worth mentioning is this – in two weeks they will be 35 years old.  For my 17th birthday in 1975, my parents gave me an orange bowling ball (my high school colors were orange and black), a bag, and a pair of shoes.  The ball lasted about five years before I replaced it.  The bag made it until two years ago when it finally wore out.  But the shoes live on, season after season . . .

And they come in handy every now and then in the community league I bowl in during the winter.  We have quite a few twenty- and thirty-somethings, and some of them have to gripe occasionally about how rough their day was or how tired they are or how sore they are or some such thing.  I have an easy response – “Oh, knock it off  . . . my bowling shoes are older than you are.”