Rub His Belly For Me

I sit in a dark, cold room with the sound of a small white-noise fan and Todd's occasional snores for music. It's Vegas. It's the first full day of set-up--yesterday we started at 3:00 pm and quit at 8:00 pm with the gridwalls and foamcore up and the foamcore seams taped. Today we follow our carefully wrought (or is that "fraught"?) plan for putting up all the artwork. We already hit two snags to the plan yesterday. First we didn't have as many gridwall sections stored here as we thought. Oops. We were four panels (or eight linear feet) short. We came up with a work-around for the shortage (1/4" plywood panels that we use to pack the foamcore in the shipping crate) but then we decided that the walking flow was too restricted if we put them all up. In the end we cut four linear feet (32 square feet) from our display. There was spirited discussion on whether we also needed to cut the amount of work displayed so it wouldn't look jammed in, and the final decision was to try the current amount of work and see.

Dinner was at Benihana's in the hotel. We ordered at 9:00 pm (sorry Dee, I really did think I'd be asleep by then). I happily slurped gin slings from my little porcelain Hotei, and realized that I had finally become Spanish without going back to Spain: It may have been 9:00 in Las Vegas, but my body was still on Atlanta time, and it was midnight there and I had been up since 5:00 am! Didn't mar my enjoyment of the evening, though I was a zombie by the time we stumbled up to our rooms at 10:00.

Now it's time to get ready to head out for another day of excitement. I managed to sleep till 5:30 am (8:30 at home), but then I had to get up and forge into the day. I think I'll rub my little Budai's belly for luck and prosperity and head off to the show!