More sites along the Parkway

I didn't take half as many photos as I'd have liked...last week.  Now we've had a rain, and lots of wind, so I imagine the trees look a bit different.

We found Julian Price Lake, which Helen said was a great spot.

And we visited the Moses Cone Folk Arts Center, in an old house built in Southern Plantation Style.

Huge home built on the money of the cotton and textile industry which included denim production, (blue jeans anyone?)  It's now a store for the Southern Highlands Craft Guild.

And we passed by a Woolly Worm caterpillar.  They are used to predict the winter severity around here.  I don't really know how.  There's a Woolly Worm Festival near here.

The Woolly Bear caterpillar has 13 brown and black segments, which ... correspond to the 13 weeks of winter. The lighter brown a segment is, the milder that week of winter will be. The darker black a segment is, the colder and snowier the corresponding week will be.

And for you trivia lovers.  What kind of moth or butterfly does the Woolly Worm turn into? A tiger moth!

I do know my iPhone suddenly had a dead battery, so there were no more photos for the trip.  I later found out that the cell data was being drained like crazy by various aps that were turned on...so the whole family is out of data already for the last week of our billing period.  Drat it all. I knew how to turn that off, but then the little thing was updated, and it went back on again.  Not going to allow it to update again!

Today's Quote:

What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but, scattered along life's pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.

Joseph Addison

 

Customer connection

It happened this morning...the feeling I need to have, to make pottery.

I have the new "square" on my new iPhone.  So I can make charge card sales.  It's great, and it's free.  The purchase price has a 2.75% fee taken out when the sale is posted to my checking account.

Of course my first day with it, and I'd just gotten it out of the box half an hour before setting up at the Tailgate Market.  I did log on with computer and made sure I had the right password.  Geese, I have so many passwords now, I need a password to look at the list of them, cause of course that's the master list.  And now they (whoever They are) won't let me use a previous password again, so I can't cycle through the list.

Anyway, I arrived, helped set up, and had a crick in my neck.  You know, shoulder neck tight and won't let you turn your head a certain way...

So the first person who sees one of my mugs, also sees the credit card sign, and I say, you can be the first to try it out.  He also has one on his, he says, but we can't get the card to swipe.  So we try entering it by hand, but it asks him for not only the card number, but something neither one of us had heard of - CVW or something strange.  And his Zip...but he didn't know either of those.

I thought it strange that it wouldn't work, actually it said the register wasn't connected...which meant the little "square" thing wasn't reading.  SO, I wiggled and pushed, and pulled, etc.  All you are allowed to do before breaking technological things.

Did I mention 2 of my USB ports started to not read (i.e. were dead) on the computer yesterday?  I have an external mouse which uses one, and I wanted to download some photos with another...and only one USB port was working.  Goddess alive, what was going on?

But this morning they all are healed.  (I attribute that to believing in magic, elves and fairies.)

Yep.  But back to the Square.  I figured perhaps I couldn't push it in far enough because of the super duper heavy duty case...so I moved case as far out of the way as I could, and wiggled the square sideways, and voila! it worked.

And there was my customer playing banjo for the whole Tailgate market, right in front of me.  So when he had a break, I walked over and told him I'd got the square to work, and I'd buy him another cup of coffee if he still wanted the mug.  He said yes, and no, he gave me the credit card, and poured his cup of cold coffee into the new mug, and signed his name with his fingernail on the phone.  Yeah, my first Techno sale, and a really great venue for advertising my mugs...a banjo player.

And he caught my eye after market from across the grass and smiled as I packed up the remaining pots. 

Another dear patron came by and gave me a hug as well as a purchase of another mug.  Her smiles mean a lot to me too.

 And this other mug sat on the table of the vendor right next to our booth, where she sells organic cleaning products.  (Hers was another credit card sale!)

I may have hated those plastic cards at times in my life.  But they are just another way of being in the marketplace, and today I'm so happy to have them to share my mugs with friendly folks. Connections.