This past weekend, I was doing a show. It was one of those strange weekends, a comedy of errors, if you like. It seemed like everything was going wrong.

Thankfully, or maybe unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, the misery was spread out amongst several vendors.

I was at the Craft and Hobby Association trade show this last weekend. It's a great big trade show where buyers go to find the latest craft items and other things to sell in their shops. Since it's a trade show, you can't purchase items and take them home with you. So, it's a little bit different from the regular art or craft shows that most of us are used to doing.

I am not a morning person. Nor do I wish to be. I like the quiet solitude of the midnight hours when there is nothing but the chirping of the crickets to disturb my reverie.

So, why do I get up before the crack of dawn on a Saturday? Because of an art show. Typically, setup time starts around 6am. With an hour drive, that means leaving the house at 5am. Which means getting up at 4am.

Yes, that's 4am, the time I usually go to bed.

I did a show this weekend. It was at a major tourist attraction. There were people there, but not as many as I had hoped. Probably because the gas prices in California have increased so dramatically over the last few days. There wasn't even much traffic along the drive home Sunday night.

By the time I got home very late on Sunday, I was exhausted. When I woke up Monday morning, I could barely get myself out of bed. It felt like somebody had increased gravity by about 20%.

I did a favor for a fellow artist. It was a small thing. I let her borrow one of my booth display items for a couple of years. I hadn't used it in a while, so it wasn't like I needed it. And, it was perfect in her booth.

A few days ago she returned it. In the bag with the display piece was a big thank you card. She mentioned there was a little something else in there as a thank you.

The Art-A-Fair Festival is now over. I've been sleeping in, goofing off, being lazy, and basically getting some much needed rest.

Today, my best friend came over. She is visiting from Texas, so I haven't seen her in a while. Unfortunately, we didn't have much time together. So, we spent what little time we had doing our usual stuff: breakfast and the mall.

I was in my booth at the Art-A-Fair Festival yesterday. There was a couple looking at the artwork in the booth across from me. They really liked a piece by one of our student artist scholarship winners, Callie Fink.

Sunday, I was in my booth at the Art-A-Fair Festival. A couple came up to me and started chatting like they knew me. It took me a few moments to realize that I had spoken to them the day before. The first time I met them, they gave my work lots of compliments; but, they weren't buying anything.

Or, to paraphrase the line from the Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry movie Magnum Force, "an artist's got to know his limitations." This past weekend, I did two back-to-back shows. Setup and teardown on Saturday, setup and teardown on Sunday.