The last night

This final day for me in Tucson was spent running around to three different shows to pick up stuff that I had ordered earlier. All the shows were busier today, and people are still arriving to start their shopping.


This has been overall the coldest week I've ever spent at the Gem shows. Would you believe this was a hotel fountain in an enclosed courtyard yesterday afternoon?! Yikes! Today was much more reasonable weather for Tucson.


I spent over 2 hours filling out @#$%$ customs forms this afternoon. Everything has been carefully packed up by the great guys at the Pakmail booth and will be picked up by the UPS truck on Monday, and in a week or 10 days, our intrepid webmistress will be inundated with new stuff to photograph and categorize and upload to the beadFX website.

My overall impression talking to people at the shows is that attendance is down significantly. However, the weekend crowd was more than before, possibly because of the warmer weather and the fact that people whose travel plans were upset by the airport closures earlier in the week have finally arrived.