Crazy Train/Crazy Week

What a week.

Sunday morning I left Seattle by train to head to the Yarn Market News Conference in Portland. Unlike TNNA there is nothing for sale, no products introduced. It is strictly a business conference for yarn shop owners and managers. I was seated with two other area yarn shop owners on the train. Before the train even left the station I knew we were in for a challenging ride.

There were two women seated next to us. One was older, clearly in poor health, and quite deaf. We knew this immediately because she shouted everything at the top of her lungs and her traveling companion had to shout at her to be heard. Repeatedly. The woman traveling with her was much younger and I could tell the moment I laid eyes on her that she had a substance abuse problem. She was bone-thin and seemed not quite in her right mind. They had never met before but were the perfect counterparts to one another to create a perfect storm of crazy. They shouted for over four hours about very personal issues like abusive parents and intimate health issues. The younger woman popped pills and drank the entire trip until she was literally falling down drunk. She toppled over in the aisle, they dropped things, spilled things and created a ruckus for over four hours. The craziest moment came, I believe, when the older woman announced in a voice so loud that no one on the train could have missed it that she was wearing a diaper due to incontinence. She repeated this FOUR TIMES. We had several delays and were already completely exhausted when we got to Portland.

Then it was two jam-packed days at the conference and I discovered on Tuesday that my train to Seattle was going to be at least three hours late and would actually be a bus since mudslides had disabled the tracks between Seattle and Portland. I was starting to freak out a bit when I saw the General Manager of Skacel, based in Seattle, and asked if he was driving home that night. It turned out he and the new Director of New Product Research and Development were and they were incredibly kind and gave me a ride home. I got dropped off at Ikea and Wes met me there which was so much better than having him pick me up at the train station at 3 or 4 am if I had taken the train-bus.

My two days at work were a blur. I had things to catch up on but also so many news ideas from the conference. And today the kids are off from school. I feel like I need a vacation!