I know it’s ridiculous to complain about the sunshine! and the gorgeous weather! and the warm! and the chance to go to the beach! again!!! but I am SO DONE with summer. It was an especially long and hot one here, made longer and hotter by the oven attached to my midsection. Plus, I FINALLY found a pair of brown flat boot to fit over my giant calves and I want to wear them before the pregnancy swelling gets too bad.

The in-between seasons – Spring and Fall – are the best times of the year here in New England. (Although I don’t know why I think of them as in-between. They’re just as long as the Winter and Summer.) And as much as I love the budding trees and melting snow and daffodils and balmy days in March April May, Fall is sort of New England’s “thing”. If you don’t slow down just a little to enjoy the beautiful hills flaming with reds and yellows and oranges or get the sudden urge for a steaming mug of mulled cider on a cool evening or sigh with happiness when the smell of wood stove starts drifting through the neighborhood then you’re dead inside. DEAD INSIDE.

But yesterday it was 84 degrees. And today it’s supposed to be almost 9o. And humid. I would be turning the air conditioning back on…if we had any air conditioning.

I’ve decided the best course of action is to just WILL Fall into being. I got out the pumpkin decorations. I changed the wreath on the door from a jaunty bucket of yellow (fake) flowers to (fake) twigs and leaves and berries. And then, in a blatant act of defiance against Mother Nature, I took Baby Evan apple picking. I wore flip-flops. He wore socks but no shoes (also known as the hobo baby compromise).

Holmberg Orchards

Baby Evan was REALLY convinced he wanted to eat one of the decorative gourds. He tried to sample one in every color.

He did a lot better in the orchard, although that face in the middle is from eating an apple he found on the ground. P.S. The adorable little girl is his friend Amelia. She's FRICKIN ADORABLE.

We’ll have to go back when it’s Fall for reals and do the hay ride and get our pumpkins and buy some mums and cider and do the rest of the traditional New England Autumnal Family Weekend. Hopefully when it’s cold enough to wear boots. Or at least shoes.

TOTALLY INACCURATE

My neighborhood has a skunk problem.

Let me rephrase that.

My neighborhood, which is well within city limits, where I can look into at least four other houses’ windows from my own because they are so close, where emergency sirens and roaring trucks are far more common than bunnies and birdies, has been taken hostage by skunks.

The week we bought the house, back in the good old days BK (before kids) when I still took my poor long suffering dog Brutus for real walks several times a day instead of just shoving him out the door and glaring at him to hurry up and pee, we ran across a skunk wandering down the sidewalk at 7 am. I managed to drag Brutus, howling and whining, two blocks home before the poor, dazed skunk even realized what was going on. I breathlessly called animal control to report a TOTALLY CRAZY skunk sighting but apparently they don’t work at 7 am so I got the front desk of the police station. I described in great detail exactly where I saw the skunk, the intersection he was waddling towards and (sigh)what he looked like, as thoroughly and completely as I would have described a robbery suspect.

I bet those cops laughed about me for DAYS.

The skunks are everywhere. They’re digging in my trash cans making a mess. They’re standing in my driveway in the middle of the afternoon. They’re wandering around my yard in the evenings making Brutus go apeshit. They’re squashed flat in the middle of the road, making me gag and my eyes water.

I am sick and tired of these motherbleeping skunks in my motherbleeping town.

Tuesday afternoon the baby, the groceries and I were trapped in the car for 10 minutes while a clearly dazed and unwell skunk wandered through the garden, so when Brutus started pacing and whining around 8 o’clock I figured the beast was back and terrorizing our street. I slammed the door and yelled at the dog to sit down muttering about moving back to the country, where my landlord took care of lost skunks the old fashioned way – with a .22 and a shovel. (True story.)

When the dog woke me up with MORE whining at 4 am I spent 20 minutes debating whether it was worse to ignore him and clean up dog poop in the morning or let him out and deal with a dog-skunk death match and the smelly horrible after effects before dawn.

You can see how that might be a hard decision.

Eventually I felt enough dog-mommy guilt that I decided to let him out – after turning on every exterior light and peering out the back door suspiciously looking for skunky signs like…I don’t know. Wilted flowers. Droppings. A squirrel holding it’s nose. When poor Brutus was eventually released to the yard he barely made it off the porch before he started peeing. And peeing. And peeing. I started counting mississippis when he was STILL peeing after what felt like 10 minutes and I made it to 45 before he stopped to poop. And then he peed some more.

I am a terrible dog owner. I blame the skunks.

But what can we do? It’s not like I’m going to set traps – I couldn’t bring myself to use any kind that killed the skunk (especially since there are a dozen or so outdoor cats in my neighborhood) and an angry, trapped LIVE skunk sounds even worse than skunk eating my trash. Animal control doesn’t seem to care. They’ve been staging this attack since early spring and it just gets worse every year. Advice appreciated.

Pinky swear. I just can’t shut up until I share a few more stories, pictures and do a little name dropping *coughReecoughcoughLoraleecough*.

My flight out was…crowded. Apparently Hell now operates an airline from Hartford to Minneapolis. There’s no other way to explain sitting in a teeny tiny middle seat between snoring shoeless guy and plus-size over perfumed grandma for 2+ hours with so little room I could neither cross my legs or work on my knitting. But the flight was blessedly on time and once I found my chauffeured car (!!!!!!) at baggage claim I was mere minutes away from that delicious red velvet cake and a great Q&A with The Pioneer Woman herself.

The funny thing about a crafting conference instead of a blogging conference is that the attendees were split about 50/50 on whether or not they had ever even HEARD of Ree Drummond. The mind, it boggles. Although I bet someone somewhere is writing the exact same thing about idiots like me who hadn’t heard of Amy Butler before. (I have now and I love her the appropriate amount.)

High point: When Ree signed my book.

Low point: When I hit myself in the head with said book after telling her my palms were super sweaty and she was cute.

Yes, Ree is wearing 2 different shirts because that was 2 different days. Like I said, since so many people were unfamiliar with her blog she was without fawning masses 90% of the time.

After lunch I made it to a panel on Social Media and managed to accidentally find a seat next to an outlet (DEAD IPHONE ALERT CODE RED WEE OOOO WEE OOOO) and next to Nicole from Lark Crafts, my contact at the event. Afterward I hung around awkwardly hoping for a chance to talk to Loralee and thank her for the link that lead me to the conference in the first place. She ended up asking a group of us stragglers for business cards and when I passed her mine she looked at it…and looked again…and said “Waaaait a minute…” and then JUMPED UP and ran around the table and hugged me and hugged me and hugged me again. The other women who had been standing around all stared and one of the asked “Ok who is this famous person?” IT WAS AWESOME. Loralee is totally the same in real life as on her blog – funny and real and gorgeous and so so so nice.

I managed to check in, find my room and get changed for dinner with a few minutes to spare so I turned on the TV and was surprised to see Jeopardy! was on. Central time is weird. Anyways, this was the Final Jeopardy! question. None of the contestants knew the answer.

I totally got it though. Because I am a genius. Clearly. Do YOU know the answer?

Then it was time for the Keynote dinner.

Me & Loralee (with PW in the background showing someone her pretty earrings), Amy Butler speaking, Kerrie (one of the other winners) & Nicole from Lark Crafts & me, Mary Jane Butters speaking

And then I limped up to my room, ripped off my high heels (poor choices, Suzanne, poor choices) and passed out. For exactly two hours. Then I woke up and composed eight zillion blog posts in my head and worried about finding my way around the next day and worried Baby Evan missed me and worried everyone secretly hated me and worried some more. I didn’t sleep very much. The possessed alarm clock didn’t help.

On Friday I attended a panel about blogging that included Lisa Leonard, Heather Bullard, Brett Bara and Loralee Choate. FINALLY, something I know a little bit about. I almost broke my neck nodding along to all the advice (write often! good quality pictures are important! comment comment comment!) and loved hearing people’s different opinions on personal vs. professional blogging.

Then there was the box lunch with the Women Entrepreneurs panel. It was the only place I felt totally intimidated and out of my league – not a single person mentioned The Twitter or The Facebook for 2 1/2 hours. To be honest, the whole middle part of Friday is just a big blur. The schedule was so full I hardly had any time at all to catch my breath.

Which is something I definitely needed to do, since right after lunch I ducked back into the Handmade Market for this…

OH HAI THERE.

O My, isn’t Allison ADORABLE?

I’m not even gonna lie – it was totally weird meeting a bloggy friend in person for the first time. You already know so much about them that the basic hi-where-you-from-how-many-kids-do-you-have-what-do-you-do? small talk is pointless, but you can’t really just jump in with the super personal details. You end up standing around grinning like a crazy person but have nothing to say.

Of course, the initial awkwardness didn’t stop me for a SECOND and since she was foolish enough to give me her cell phone number I managed to invite myself along to dinner with Allison, her friend Cindy and Cindy’s blog friends Kim and Jenny and (another) Allison (who writes for Apartment Therapy). We started at Ikea, which makes sense when you’re hanging out with house bloggers, where I enjoyed crepes and lingonberry soda and bought an inspirational yard of fabric I’m going to plan the new nursery/play room around. Then we went over to the Mall of America (Which turned out just to be a big mall. I don’t know what I was expecting.) for some super cheap happy hour food and wine Diet Coke* lemonade.

This is the part where things could be really awkward if I say “Meeting Allison in person was like getting together with my best friend from high school who I haven’t seen in years but I already know I love” and she’s all “Uh, yeah, it was…nice. Please stop emailing me.” It was like a first date where one person thought they were totally Soul Mates and the other couldn’t wait for the night to be over. My social awkwardness, let me show you it. I think it’s a blogger thing. But IN MY HEAD, it was a super awesome night.

On Saturday I played with yarn with Kristen Nicholas…

Embroidering knitting with yarn was SO cool and surprisingly easy.

Attended one more panel – The Future of Retail: The Digital Marketplace…

Me & Lisa Leonard (I totally dorked out and begged for a pic), Amy Turn Sharp speaking on the panel

Amy writes a blog, has an incredibly successful wooden toy business (that once got Dooce-ified), and had her teeny weeny 3 week old baby boy Scout with her at the conference. She was all kinds of cool and nice. I talked to her about my horrible pregnancy pelvic pain and instead of giving me the side-eye and running away she was all “YES!! THE PAIN!! IN THE CROTCH!!” and made emphatic stabbing motions. I liked her.

And then…the weekend was over.

Nancy Soriano (one of the creators), Kerrie, Erin (winner of a local contest to attend), me, Jo Packham (creator and founder of Where Women Create Magazine) and Jennie (the third Lark Crafts scholarship winner)

It was fantastic. Amazing. Everything I had hoped for and more. It still feels more like a dream than something that actually happened to me and being back in my real life (oh boy am I back in my real life) makes it even more unbelievable.

Thank you again to Lark Crafts & Nicole & Jo & Debbie & Meaghan & everyone else who handled all the details to get me there and registered and made sure I always felt welcome and special. I promise to use everything I learned to do something beautiful.

P.S. I wanted to share this cookbook with you too:

How adorabe is this?!?

The author, Zac, was working as the event’s videographer and tried to give a copy to Nicole, since she’s all fancy and important and has tons of publishing connections, but I fawned all over it so much that she passed it to me. I feel sort of bad for stealing it from her (and I think he was pretty disappointed too) but I looooove it. I think I’ll throw a Halloween party just to make those cupcakes.

P.P.S. If you were at the event or want to write about the event, please feel free to use my pictures from this post or the other ones. All I ask for is an attribution and a link back. If you want unedited or larger copies just email me bebehblog at gmail dot com.

*There is NO DIET COKE in Minnesota. It was all Pepsi, all the time, and it SUCKED. I ended up drinking more coffee than I’ve had in years.

THE END

If I had known I was going to The Creative Connection months ago rather than just a few weeks ago, I would have done the smart thing and started staving up my pennies. Instead, I had to borrow money from my mom to make sure I could do some shopping. Because nothing says “independent, grown ass woman going on a fancy almost-business-related trip” like begging your parents for cash.

And if I had known just how many gorgeous things would be for sale at the Handmade Market I would have borrowed A LOT more. Or maybe sold a baby kidney.

Pretty Things. Do you spy some ruffles?

I must have walked through the room a dozen times before I could pick my jaw up off the floor long enough to stop and choose a few things to bring home. Here’s what I ended up with:

Adorable headband, Chatty Gus & Lovely Gus pouches from Gussy. One of the above may turn into a giveaway for one of you lucky readers, if only I can shut up the voice in my head that keeps screaming NOOOO!!! MY PRECIOUSSSSSSSSSSS! MIIIIIINE!!!!!

And in case you needed me to tell you, yes, Gussy – I mean Maggie – is absolutely totally 100% as cute in real life as she seems on her blog.

Beautiful lock & key necklace from J. Jewels Designs. Julia was super sweet and nodded patiently while I tried to explain The Twitter and how much I loved it. You should follow her just to prove me right.

Rosette headband from Allora Handmade. I sort of stalk-followed her up to one of the panels and she let me sit next to her and mutter about the interwebs without once asking me to please put a sock in it. I’m going to leave her Etsy shop up on E’s computer every day from now until he takes a hint and buys me a matching necklace.

I couldn’t resist this onesie. I bought it at the Red Shoes 26 Design booth & she had adorable prints and illustrations too. Her Etsy shop doesn’t have the onesies available right now but I may send an email begging for at least one more.

Necklaces from Lisa Leonard. The one on the left was my very first purchase at the market and I’ve been wearing it ever since. The one on the right was the gift from the gala dinner.

The actual yarn maker wasn’t there – I grabbed this from one of the shops because how could I possible go somewhere that sold yarn and not buy any?!?! It is SO SOFT I just want to roll in it. I can’t wait to turn it into something beautiful – I’m thinking a scarf.

Beautiful minky lined camera strap for my Nikon. Again, I fail at naming the actual maker (if it’s you, or if you know, PLEASE sent me a link!) but I picked this up at the Oh Sweet Sadie booth. They had a HUGE selection of gorgeous stuff from baby gifts to jewelry to these camera straps in a dozen pretty fabrics.

I could have easily spent $5000 and an extra week just wandering around buying headbands and necklaces and flower clips. I’m such a sucker for the handmade stuff it was hard to pass up a single one. And because I am a selfish selfish person, I spent every cent on myself and didn’t do a lick of Christmas shopping. I hope all my relatives like fruitcake.