Every Day is Different

We had fun yesterday, in the October sun, a lucky day for the Market and for me as well. It was the Market-wide Sale, and I took the kids shirts I am trying to close out, and displayed them in a new way, in baskets turned on their sides on the top shelf. I didn't sell that many but felt satisfied anyway.

Fortunately I had taken my good stuff as well and was happy to know hoodies will still sell. I have a lot of inventory built up for Holiday Market and I need to turn it into cash to pay those bills, which will come due well before HM starts. It's always a tight dance this time of year and I am determined not to borrow money.

Today I turned on the heat and spent some time working on a short story instead of reading the paper. Writing is really fun for me, but it's always hard to sit down and start. One of my tricks is to leave something in progress, at a point where I still have ideas for it. I jot them down and take a break from it, which often turns into a few days or more, and then I am itching to get back and go at it. I'm in a similar place with a nonfiction article I am working on about the Market, sustainability and bikes. I'm excited about it and just might spend the day writing, even though the sun is out. I did laundry, that's good enough. I'll sweep the floors.

I had to repair my cart yesterday. You can see here that the tongue twisted way to the side, because I got caught up on a part of the sidewalk that I try to avoid. Nice to know such a thing can happen (Elise had told me a similar story, but now I get it) and so glad I had my little tools with me. It just required the right Allen wrench. Yay for me for carefully buying a serious bike tool set last winter.

I also caught up today on recording my sales for both Sat. and Tues. and checking the average. We only have a four more outdoor Saturdays and two more Tuesdays. Both of my averages are almost exactly the same as last year, which is good news for me. Not losing ground, not suffering in the economy, just keeping on keeping on.

A bunch of emotional stuff happened yesterday, which is kind of normal for being in public. I made a vow to not get involved in any long conversations that kept me from my booth, so I stayed in it, but the conversations came over to me. It was better, though still interfered a bit with sales. The conversations reminded me that I am just as irrational as the next person, while also being just as self-aware, just as practical, just as deluded, just as concerned, just as passionate. In short, ordinary as can be. Just as full of flaws and self-doubt as anyone, struggling for control and progress and finding common ground and the common good.

Life. If I could change anything about my past, it would be to work harder to get my fears out of my way. Fear of failure, fear of success. Fear of disappointment, fear of the "narcissistic souffle" of self-aggrandizement. Fears of laziness, fears of work addiction. I would relax more into "It is what it is."

But of course it is never too late to work on important things and sometimes progress is being made even though we don't think so. The conversations I had yesterday opened up a couple of blocks in a small area of my life and things just might flow better now. If it results in my taking myself less seriously, that's great. I want to laugh more like I did after taking this picture:

Hallowe'en's coming, and it's on a Sunday, so costumes at Market will be rich. Even more so than on the regular days.

And in political news, I heard the results of the OCF election already, thanks to Facebook. It seems that all the incumbents were re-elected, which I won't comment about, but if you want to project that to the current state or national scene, it might represent a good trend. No tea party at the OCF, thank goodness.