Halloween and Louisville

See that little gamin to the right? That's Veeka minutes after she won the cakewalk competition at a local Halloween festival. It was getting late and we had already walked home, as I had no money inmy coat. Veeka wanted to try the cakewalk at least once, so she took $1 out of her own purse and we drove back. The first time she did so, she landed on the number 8 and that was the one called out. She shot up like a pogo stick. She had won. The night before was Halloween and although all sorts of nasty weather was forecast, it actually was a windy, romantic night. Veeka (shown here in her blue Cinderella dress that we got at DisneyWorld), bopped about the neighborhood gathering all sorts of goodies. There was a brief squall where we got drenched for a few minutes but fortunately I'd brought two umbrellas.October was full of plenty of travel, our latest journey being a trip to Louisville so I could be part of a crafts festival there. Why drive 6 hours for that? Well....please remember that I wrote a book based on short stories taken from the Little Colonel books. Those books took place in Pewee Valley, whichis due north of Louisville. A year ago, the Louisville Courier-Journal did an article on my book (called 'Knights, Maidens and Dragons'), but I had a feeling that word was still not out about this book. When I visited the area a year ago, someone from the local historical society who took me around said the only way to really publicize your goods was to show up at the annual crafts festival in late October. So, I decided to do so, as I had a bunch of antique Little Colonel books to sell, along with my own book. It was a lovely fall day. Turns out I made $154 from book sales but my expenses in getting there (gas, meals, registration and lodging) were more than $300! Hmmmm. But I definitely got word out about my book plus an invitation to do a book signing at a book shop in LaGrange about 10 miles up the road should I return to the area. What I'd really like, though, is to for a local shop to keep the book in stock. Am still working on that. It helped that I had dressed Veeka up as Lloyd Sherman (in an old-fashioned dress, white stockings, a wide collar and a hat) and had her pass out press releases about my book. So she got known quite quickly around the exhibit hall. Must say about selling books: You *really* have to involve people as they stroll by so they will notice you and maybe linger by your booth. It's hard to let people go who promise you they'll be back to make a final decision, because any merchant knows that once someone leaves your booth, they won't return. If you don't make the sale then and there, it won't happen. But at least Louisville produced some sales. A gathering of local authors in Jackson a few nights later (where I also had a booth) produced no sales, which was tough on me, as my babysitter that night cost me $45!I continue to study and am discovering that an overload of four graduate courses is a lot of work. I am happy to say that I just passed a test where a classmate and I designed several web pages the other day in record time. That is, we had to have the thing built, then uploaded to the university's server by the end of class. I sure sweat bullets on that one and you can view it here. In my entrepreneurship class, I'm in a committee studying out to get online college education into Nigeria. It does not currently exist there. In the ethics class, I got a 100 on my midterm. That's historic for me. And in the research methods class, I am inundated with things to do. Next paper due has to do with content analysis. One day I was wandering down to the student unionbuilding when I got swept up in an attempt to break the Guinness Book of World Records mark on the amount of people doing sit-ups at the same time. So more than 500 of us sat on the ground and for a minute did as many sit-ups that we could. The previous record was 250 people, so we broke that. It helped that we participants all got a free lunch afterwards.