You win some, you lose some…

This weekend has not been my favourite!
I don’t even know where to start really.
I don’t want to whinge about it, but at the same time I like to keep it real here, and unfortunately, this weekend the real is grim.
Just plain old nasty grim!

Firstly I spent most of Friday night & the early hours of Saturday morning cleaning up sick.
Hands up who knows that’s not a good way to start a weekend!!

Poor poor Abbie was not a well girl.
I suspect it was directly related to feeding her prawns, so we won’t be doing that again just in case!
However, I can be thankful that come 6.30am Saturday morning she woke up like nothing had happened and apart from an extra long sleep yesterday she was in flying form like nothing had even happened.
Gotta love how fast kids bounce back!

Unfortunately I did not bounce back quite so quickly, and for me that meant I had to pack up my car, leave my family & drive 2 hours south for my market on not a lot of sleep!
And stress. – I get anxious as anything when my kids vomit now – ever since Hannah almost died of Rotavirus – so my stomach was tied up in stress induced knots.

But we made it down south in one piece and I slept reasonably well.
Unlike Bec who got to listen to me snoring all night thanks to my still heavy cold.
Poor Bec!

Cue this morning…

We get to the market arena at 7am to start setting up.
By 7.30am we are holding onto our marquee for dear life to stop it blowing away.
One emergency dash to Bec’s grandparents later & we have half a ton of weight anchoring it down  – those legs weren’t going any where in a hurry!

Cue 8.30am and I discover I’d left the memory card for my camera in my laptop – back at home!!
And my phone back in my bag at Bec’s grandparents house.
Doh.
I felt like my right arm had been cut off by not being able to take photos!

But our stall looks absolutely beautiful, as witnessed by Bec’s phone…

Cue smiley faces, having just survived and come back from the sad face wind fiasco, and have a beautiful stall ready to go.

Sadly it was short lived…

Cue 8.40am – A crazy Western Australia downpour hit us… the type of rain where you seem to get a days rain all in the space of 3-4 minutes.

Cue a 1 metre wide RIVER running through our marquee (we were on the road gutter side), Bec’s rack falling over and a bunch of her stock falling off into the mud and getting ruined.
Not cool.
Sooooo not cool.

I don’t look very impressed in this photo below do I?
Well that was BEFORE the river came through.
I looked even more unimpressed after that trust me!

I lost count of how many times the wind blew over our mannequins.

Luckily that heavy rain cleared up quite quickly.
But to stop the whole Mary Poppin Umbrella effect with our Marquee we had to take all the sides down and take the risk of later rain damage to overcome the more treacherous wind risk.

Then we packed up my sign after that tried to blow over a number of times.
Then we packed up the mannequins after we got sick of picking them up a zillion times.
Then we picked up bags & cards and signs, and bags and cards and signs, and bags, and cards, and ….

By 1pm we had had enough of battening things down, picking up windblown stock, dodging rain clouds, and after another small shower came through we decided to pack up for good, despite it being against the festival policy.
There is only so much losing of stock and hanging onto a buckling marquee a person can take and to be quite honest I think we had done well to survive that long!

Oh and there was the small fact that no one was actually spending any money. I think we would have made do if they were.

The only trouble then was that we were all packed up with nowhere to go as we were not able to move our car & get out to go home until 4pm when the event finished.

So we did what any good women would do and went shopping.
Cue us walking around and admiring everyone else holding onto their marquees for dear life else’s stalls.
2 hours of walking around shopping and all I bought was a bottle of water. Go me!
I was so proud of myself because I could have spent a fortune if I’d allowed myself to!

The general consensus though was that no one was making any money today.
I think the weather killed it for us all.
Not to mention there weren’t enough of the right clientèle there for our particular stall.

The first real rain we have had in 3 months and it came today of all days.
Gutted!

***

Now I ache all over & have a whole bunch of ruined market props for not a lot of return.
Weeks of hard work of preparation for nothing but a big fat lesson.
– A lesson I would have been happy not to learn in all honesty!

So that is my weekend.
And my grim.

Luckily tomorrow is another day…
it can only get better from here right.