A little advice

Never start a new job the same week that you are planning a convention and teaching classes at that convention, especially if there is a music festival going on that your child is playing in!

First the new job. On Wednesday, I started working at my new job. There's a lot to learn, but as long as I stay calm, it seems to be going well. Everyone is great to work with, and how can you hate a job that had birthday cake the first day, a surprise birthday lunch the second, and a catered grand opening party the third.

I've always thought that this would be my dream job, and so far, so good even with the steep learning curve.

A few months ago, I was approached to be on the planning committee for a scrapbooking convention, the first of it's kind to be held here. We had modest goals, and surpassed almost all of them. Along the way we learned a lot, and I made two new friends. This past weekend, we had the conference, over 70 scrapbookers attended, along with 10 vendors, 20 or so just taking classes and a bunch of people who just came to shop at the vendor show. Overall the reviews have been great. We had people who drove 6 hours to come!

I taught a couple classes, one on scrapbooking for beginners, and the second on cardmaking. Both were well received, and I had a lot of fun teaching them. It's neat to see other people's creativity get sparked.

The music festival is always a busy couple weeks. This year Hamster was performing in the piano and speech categories and Squid was in the instrumental and speech categories. Hamster had bigtime stage fright at the first speech event, and ended up not being ajudicated, although he did manage to recite his poem after the other participants were ajudicated. An hour later, he got up and performed his piano piece quite well, without any stage fright. He got a decent mark, better than I expected. The next day, both boys performed poetry, and Hamster got up on stage and recited his poem almost perfectly. Squid did fine on his poem, too and he ended up getting a medal for Canadian Poetry Solo. The next week, it was Squid's turn to play. He did two pieces, and did very well on both. He was awarded the woodwind certificate of excellence and was asked to play one piece in the showcase concert! Unfortunately, I couldn't go to the concert, because the band I play in had a gig. A gig on the first night of the scrapbooking conference!