Hello Mr. Governor!

Today Governor Ted Kulongoski visited Dallas on a tour of local buisnisses and Grandma's Attic made the list. When he came, he entered through the back door and our entire staff greeted him. I was introduced as "the webmaster" of our webstore. He was immediately intrigued. He asked "can you show me how it works?"

Pleased that I had caught his attention I enthusiasticly replied, "Of Course!" He followed me back to the office. Embarassingly I had too much software running at the time to even load our homepage (winamp, photoimpact, hp picture viewer, msn messenger, a few web pages). Closing winamp freed up enough space that I could open our home page. I explained the process of creating an item for sale online.

"I want to buy something called wedding rings, how do I do that" he says. I show him our search engine and it finds six pages of results. He identifies what he wants, and says, "that's it, my wife has one of those." It happend to be one of ours. I explained how we own two pattern companies (Calico Hills Farm and Patti-Ann Publications) and that he had found a pattern by Calico Hills Farm. He wasn't very interested in patterns. "So, where do I buy the quilt?" He asked.

Some of us laughed, one of his associates said, "this is for the other people," meaning the ones who sew the quilt, not the collectors. That's a common misunderstanding about quilt shops. They don't sell quilts, just materials to make them. Anyways he seemed at least mildly intrigued. All this took place at my fire hawk workstation you might remember from an October post.

Next Ted was shown a world map with red pins stuck wherever we've shipped orders. We had just recieved our first order from Costa Rica today where coincidentally Mr. Kulongoski attended his son's wedding recently. He was very interested in the places we shipped to. "All of these are legitimate?" he asked. All but Nigeria, where a village of 200 seemed to want to attend a weekly sewing class. That's been a joke around the office for a while.

The whole day was very fun, everything seemed so exciting. It was all such a big deal. Reporters from a couple of state newspapers were asking people for names and job titles so hopefully we'll be in an article. I'm especially excited about the chance of my picture being in the paper. I do hope it is. I just had my hair cut, and I'm very photogenic by nature, so any pictures I'm sure will turn out fabulously (I'm so swollen with joy that I can't help but be conceited). I would be so happy. Aw, heck! I'm happy anyways. I just can't contain myself, I think, "if anything, this is worth posting about," so I post. I hope you enjoy the story. I know I do.