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| We're cooking with gas and ready to head to the Sebel on Friday! |
In one of my roles as a member of Team Awesome (hey, if we get to give ourselves a name we're gonna make it a good one!), the planning team for our upcoming Digital Parents conference, I was entrusted with accepting delivery of the many goodies and delights that await our delegates via their swag bags. "Sure!" I said. "Send 'em my way, I'll take care of it!"
Since January, we have been receiving courier deliveries regularly. Boxes and boxes from participating companies have been safely stacked four deep, as many across and right up to the ceiling in our spare room. Lucky we completed that house extension otherwise we seriously would have run out of room about a month ago!Two weekends ago, Steve and the LGBB kindly helped me begin unpacking these boxes. We opened them excitedly and found inside....... more boxes! A real life "nested dolls" bit o' fun. Fun, fun, fun. Cardboard Explosion barely begins to cover it for a description of what then ensued.
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| This was our couch, barely an hour in.... |
By Sunday night (of the Grand Prix weekend), I was working hard at not having a panic attack complete with hyperventilating episode. I never realised I was such an orderly beast. Neat freak, some might call it. WHO KNEW??
The two hundred swag bags having been mostly finished this past week, I was then horrified when two things happened in the house. As if they were just waiting for the bags to be made vulnerable. And here *deep breath in* are my two confessions:
1. Someone may get an extra surprise in their swag bag. A mouse!
A dirty great not-so-stealthy mouse came sauntering through our bedroom at 3am.
I awoke with that hair-raising sense that something hairy and scary was in the room - something beyond my dearly betrothed, I mean, who lay blissfully unaware and asleep beside me - and my first thought was to turn the light on, at which point said rodent alighted from my bedside table (oh yeah.... it was there *SHUDDER*), and go and get the cat.
I went and got the cat - our brave hunter, who is usually so good with bringing kill back to the doorstep whenever she pleases - but apparently she enjoys her sleep more than a good old pat and serving of mouse on a platter. I had to shut the door to the bedroom to make her stay in, encouraging her to sniff around the corners of the room where I'd seen the mouse do its best Hamburglar-tip-toeing impression back from whence it came. She looked at me, bemused, and gave a maow that wasn't so much a meow as it was a yawn. Fine. Perfect.
I took the useless lump back to her bed.
So it was left to me to sit up in bed with the light on, unable to get back to sleep. And all I could think was, "Great. What if it climbs into a swag bag down the hallway and decides not to come out and we pack him up and take him in to the Sebel? Sure, it'd make for someone's awesome vlog fodder but I don't want to be known as The Mouse House Blogger. The internet is forever. Noooo! Arooooooo!" (that was an impression of me howling to my ceiling that "the bloody cat" didn't do her job keeping mice away and she's obviously been fooling us these past two years.... She is officially the feline equivalent of the woman who used to work in my old workplace who seemed to be doing such a good job.... Until she resigned and left and they found a pile, months' worth, of important paperwork in her bottom drawer that she'd never actioned but should have and it left the company in a bit of a quandry - so that's it, then: our entire house is effectively Tabitha's bottom drawer.)
2. Someone may get an extra, extra surprise in their swag bag. A slimey dog ball!
I have had the swag bags under lock and key the past few days, diligently fending off mice and other bits of bother. Except, this one time, I came back from the kitchen with a cuppa to find Jazz had discovered them. She's been carrying her ball around in her mouth permanently, she even sleeps with the ruddy thing in her mouth - it's like her dummy - and she was trying to sniff in one. When I saw her she had the ball in her mouth. When I told her off for gingerly quality inspecting the bags with her nose, she didn't have the ball any more.
She has three "inside balls". To date, only one has surfaced. Two are missing. I hope not in the swag bags.
Dear God, please don't let any of my fellow Digital Parents blogging friends find an inside ball dropped inside their swag bag. And.... just a note from Jazz: if they do, could they kindly return it post haste.
*breathing out* It feels good to confess.
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On Friday night, the kind and energetic Naomi (of Under The Yardarm fame) brought her own swag - in a brown paper bag - and knuckled down to help us add in the final few deliveries.
The LGBB has been an enthusiastic helper this past month, it should be noted. She worked so hard and fast it was almost difficult to keep up with her! She was promoted from simply opening product boxes to make them ready, to carrying filled bags into the waiting plastic transport boxes on Friday night.
Last night, she made posters for the boxes containing the door prizes:
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| Bloggers will come in droves! Winner will be so happy s/he'll.... go to a skate park.... |
Note: If you win the door prize - any of them - I'll be your new best friend? Ohhhhh they are good. Let's just say, a courier had to step inside the house to drop off a delivery on Friday morning - the day after the Lindt boxes arrived - and he said he could smell the chocolate in the house.
NOW do you feel my pain?!?
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| Once a photobomber, always a photobomber... As Laney put it, "so she's THAT kind of chocolate Lab??" This is comedy Gold, people! |
See you Friday! Unless you're not coming and then I guess.... I won't.
As you were *anti-climactic cough*
