Trade Show Guru

I’m afraid this is going to be yet another week (week three) without a trade show related post, but I’ve got plenty of excuses. First, like most of us, I am working a lot these days. And, given that life is about balance, I’ve spent my small amount of free time on things other than penning more trade show wisdom. I’ve been doing things like gardening, revising zip line designs, and catching tadpoles.

Gardening: I’ve got a sore back. Last week the weather got nice and I decide to prep the garden for planting. This involved deciding to take out an awesome tomato plant from last year that had given us a half dozen of so red tomatoes in February but didn’t look like it would do a lot more, and lots of digging and mixing (hence the sore back). I also decided to start some seeds for transplanting later. In the past we’ve gotten seedlings, but I thought this year it would be fun to plant some seeds with the kids. We planted mainly several types of tomatoes (the most important garden vegetable and what must be planted every year), plus zucchinis, cucumbers, carrots, and several things the kids picked out.  We’ll see what happens, and how we do with snails this year.

Zip lines: I’m on about the fourth generation of zip line in the back yard. The first design used nylon rope, which ended up stretching and sagging way too much. The second generation switched to steel wire, but the hardware wasn’t beefy enough and needed to be upgraded. The third design focused on finding a faster (bigger diameter) pulley. The fourth and current design revision was to replace the handle one hung from by ones hands with a seat to sit on. I think the zip line is almost perfect now, but I’ve got to find a better way to slow kids down at the end. I’ve currently got a few tennis balls threaded on the wire that need to be moved each time, but I think a spring might work better.

Tadpoles: We were at a friends house recently and heard frogs nearby, so this weekend I decided to take the kids to a local creek in search of tadpoles. We found them… lot of them. I wasn’t planning on it, but we brought some home. It was supposed to just be for a day, but now maybe we’ll keep them until they turn into frogs… if they make it.

Well, I think these are three pretty good excuses for not having written a trade show related post. But you may have noticed the title of this post, and you may be wondering what God has to do with any of this. Well, Will over at his Healthy Living blog left a great comment last week with a joke about gardening and God, and I thought I’d close this (rambling) post with it:

A farmer bought an old, abandoned farm. The fields were grown over with weeds, the farmhouse was falling down, and the fences were broken to pieces. Soon the town preacher stops by to welcome the man, saying, “May you and God work together to make this the farm of your dreams!” A few months later, the preacher stops by again to call on the farmer. Lo and behold, it’s a completely different place. The farm house is completely rebuilt and in excellent condition, there is plenty of cattle and other livestock happily munching on feed in well-fenced pens, and the fields are filled with crops planted in neat rows. “Amazing!” the preacher says. “Look what God and you have accomplished together!” “Yes, reverend,” says the farmer, “but just remember what the farm was like when God was working it alone!”