Yep, that's me. Weary, but smiling. I just spent the past two days at the annual National Stationery Show in New York City. Wow. So much to take in and digest and look at! We had a blast though, and I think it was SO WORTH IT to go!

You haven't heard from me in a bit because: a) at the end of last week, I was busy getting ready to attend the show. I had meetings galore I reconfirming since we were packing everything into two days, and I wanted to have materials to show to the people we met with, so I needed to get all of that in order; and b) because I was then at the show itself.

I wish I knew how big the place actually is, square footage-wise. I can show you the crazy floorplan (yes, look at ALL OF THOSE BOOTHS) here. Melissa printed out a floorplan to bring with us only to find out she couldn't even read the numbers on it! So we had to figure out where we were and get our bearings on Sunday as soon as we got there. We walked the ENTIRE FLOOR on Sunday AND found time for meetings too (I'm not sure how we managed to do both, in retrospect, but somehow we did!). Monday, our colleague Audrey came with us, and we went back to spend more time at a bunch of places and managed to squeeze in a number of meetings that day too. Gotta love the booths that have special secret conference rooms for meetings -- we felt so important or something! It was so interesting to walk around and just see all of the products, the trends in design and color, the nifty new lines -- everything was very cool.

One of my favorite things was chatting for a while with the owners of Cosmo Cricket. I'm such a huge fan of their stuff to begin with, and Eric and Julie are such sweet people. We LOVED getting a special sneak peak at their fall line, which Julie had kept hidden to show only to select people. SO COOL!

So we had a blast. So much fun. Awesome meetings. Amazing ideas with which to move forward. And, maybe, just maybe I lost a pound from so much walking!