Ninth Market and Reflections on My Sanity

I hate to say this, but the only way to keep my sanity in regards to the market is to keep my feet moving and start preparing for next week immediately. The last thing I want to do is do is make dumplings, but I figure if I can get some stuff done, then the weekends won’t be one complete hellish experience. What have we created?

On that note, we had a good market, though not as good as I anticipated. In fact, at some point we were in danger of making too many dumplings, and leftover dumplings are a waste. I stopped cooking with about half an hour to go and we tried to sell what we had left. We pulled it off, but it was close. The weather was beautiful, and there were lots of people on the green, but somehow it just wasn’t that busy. Don’t get me wrong, we sold dumplings, and lots of them, but it wasn’t crazy like I anticipated. Maybe this isn’t a bad thing.

We also found that people came up to us and said they were disappointed we weren’t there last week. In fact, many people said this, including the market manager, who said people kept asking about us. While this is nice to hear, it also makes us want to keep our customers happy, which sort of enslaves us to this gig, and that’s the last thing we need. We have enough stuff going on in our lives, we were kind of hoping that this was something we could just walk away from when all was said and done, but the loyalty of our customers makes it hard. We feel guilty when we’re not there, how crazy is that? I know it’s not a huge deal, life goes on and people can live happily without our dumplings, but we do feel an obligation of sorts for our fans. Then again, maybe we’re stroking our own egoes.

We’ll see where this one goes. Until then, thanks for reading, and thanks to Susanne Nilsjo for the pic.