Wow. Has this been one heckuva day! (I suppose this will probably post on the 16th, although I'm writing it late on the 15th.) Emotions all over the place today. Started off with registering for Stampin' Up!'s Annual Convention in August. This will be my 14th in a row, and I'm due to pick up a special milestone award this year. Excited and full of anticipation – as always on Convention Registration day. 3 of my downline got registered, too. AWESOME! But then came a string of reasons why a bunch of the rest had decided not to go – and my excitement took a nose dive. Makes me so sad; Stampin' Up! Conventions are, among many other things, like family reunions. And since many of my downline are spread all over the country, it's always so much fun to reconnect every summer. But it's looking to be very different this year – with what's shaping up to be the smallest Sea to Sea Stampers representation we've had in many years.
But there wasn't too much time to wallow in my sadness; I had taxes to finish up! Now, I really, truly DID have time set aside on my calendar the end of last month to attend to this annual ritual, but I was much too sick to focus at that time. And after 3-1/2 weeks of living in this numb fog, my brain had only really started working again just this past weekend, so I was embarrassingly "down to the wire". But I'd already pulled my business stuff together earlier this year (that's where the bulk of the tax prep time goes), so I really only had the REST of the stuff to do, and I'd been putting in every minute I could snag since Monday anyway, so I was fairly confident I could pull it off before the PO closed today. So things were looking good and TurboTax produced a "bottom line" number I figured I could live with at about 11:00 o'clock this morning. So I printed out my return and started proofreading…… but something just wasn't right. Digging my way through the thing, I was pretty sure there seemed to be more medical deductions than what I was probably really entitled to. Oh great. So I eventually figured out where the problem occurred; I SWEAR TurboTax hadn't presented that particular screen the first time through…. but no matter, I still had time to fix it and reprint everything…….
….. UNTIL my printer decided this would be a good time to go into death throes! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!? I knew this thing had outlived its normal, expected lifespan and that it was probably on borrowed time, but come on! This is TAX day, for cryin' out loud! Well, long story short, 3 hours later (and a whole lotta sweating and more high blood pressure, I'm sure), I had figured out that if I printed just one page at a time I could make it limp along – sort of. So I finally got the whole darned thing printed, wrote out checks for much too much money, and raced for the Post Office. And made it with 15 whole minutes to spare! So now I guess this weekend I'll be out printer-shopping. I am SO not enthused.
But then it was time to shift gears again – to my Stampers 30 Club up in Oak Harbor. Fortunately I was simply repeating the same projects from last night's Club, and Christie had sweetly sorted and stacked everything for me before she had gone home last night. So with only minutes left between the Post Office and when I had to be out the door and on my way headed north, I tossed it all into my bag and away I went.
So tonight's group was fun, as always. (I really love ALL of my Club members; a lot of them have been stamping with me for many years so we've become friends as well.) And afterwards I stopped into a grocery store for some provisions – which made it about 11:00 when I arrived home……
…… to the absolutely stunning news that several well-known and deeply-loved and admired people at Stampin' Up!® had just been laid off today. And not just behind-the-scenes people, either – but people we love to watch present at Convention, and who have been on the fabulous recent "how to" videos that Stampin' Up! has been making. People we demonstrators know and adore. And as a matter of fact, one who had just called me a week or two ago to invite me to present at our Seattle Regional this Friday – and told me to be sure to look her up that day and say "hi".
I believe this is the first major layoff process that Stampin' Up! has ever had to go through, and I know it has been very painful at all levels while the Company works to adjust to the current marketplace. And while we knew this painful decision was coming about mid-April, somehow I never figured it would include some of the best-known names and faces there. So the evening is certainly ending on another heart-wrenching note.
Hopefully tomorrow will be brighter. It's GOT to be; we've got 12 of us going to the Seattle Regional the very next day, and I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to introduce 11 excited newbies to their first big Stampin' Up! event!
