Today’s post comes to us from our own Crystal Bay.
In the early days of Animal Fair, Dad had to hire six women from the community to make his animals on six sewing machines. As they gained popularity, he moved into the old Tonka Toy building, then to Chanhassen, Animal Fairs final resting place.
Most of the early business was solely dependent upon large companies seeking promos for their products. Such was the case with Jolly Green Giant. He designed a little facsimile of the giant in their ads, appropriately named “Sprout”. They were really cute little guys and everyone loved them.
This corporation immediately put in an order 10 times the ability of Dad to produce at that time. In desperation, he corralled every extended family member and anyone in the community to help fill this huge order. I was just one of many. We worked every weekend and night. His business depended upon delivering the promise goods.
My job was to glue noses on each of these Sprouts. Unfortunately, I did so with airplane glue. Every time I worked there, I walked out higher than a kite. No one understood my bizarre behavior at the time. Not even me. I later wondered if this explained my unusual behavior as an adult.
We did end up getting the order filled and it saved his ram shackle business.
How do you do with deadlines?
Trail Baboon 
I am a terrific procrastinator, always living on the edge. I hate it. Daughter blamrs me for her being a procrastinator, too.
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Tell her to deal with that later.
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Good one, Barbara.
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That’s the spirit, Renee, a terrific, rather than a terrible, procrastinator. Those are the kinds of people I want in my Procrastinators Extraordinaire club that is currently in the planning stages. I’ll send you a membership invitation when I get “a round toit.”
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Very well. If they’re not met, have two reasons.
1. Always have someone else to blame.
2. It is what it is.
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I don’t do well with deadlines. Not that I procrastinate, it’s just that I’m a bit of a perfectionist (is that similar to being a bit dead??) and I don’t like to do a project “good enough” when I know it can be better. But if I do have a deadline, I tend to do the work right away and have time to tweak something later but still before the deadline. (I’m mainly referring to freelance writing projects here.).
To quote Douglas Adams: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
Chris in O-town
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The mother of my oldest daughter’s highschool boyfriend worked at Animal Fair. Somewhere I have a photo of him wearing an Animal Fair bear costume one Halloween. We purchased a huge stuffed pig and donated it as a mascot for our church’s youth group (PYG – Peace Youth Group). Long before the boyfriend, Animal Fair toys were in the family, including a Henry dog. It’s fun hearing your stories, CB.
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I’m going to answer a different question that I have in my brain today. I can’t recall that I’ve ever gotten high on an inhalant or at work for any reason. But when I was a kid my family owned a cotton candy machine. This is one of several pieces of equipment that we owned because my dad had an ice cream truck when I was a little girl. Anyway we always lent it out for all kinds of fundraising things at schools and church. Once in a high school fundraiser I ran the machine all afternoon. They had stuck us in a little cubby with walls on three sides so there wasn’t any place for the cotton candy fluff to go except on me. So I did feel a little high after that afternoon from inhaling all of that spun sugar and I probably stood in the shower for an hour after that.
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VS, we knew a couple of string players in the Winnipeg Symphony, and they said having to play “The Nutcracker” repeatedly over the Christmas Holidays was like living on a pure sugar diet, not unlike you and the cotton candy machine.
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Your dad had an ICE CREAM TRUCK?
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Yep. When he was putting himself through law school and for a few years afterwards while he was trying to get his feet underneath him, he tried several entrepreneurial schemes. A couple of years they had a huge fireworks tent during the summer for Fourth of July and for a couple of years he had the ice cream truck. He never ran the truck; he always hired someone to do it. So when I was growing up we had a cotton candy machine and snow cone machine in our basement.
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I think that prolonged exposure to airplane glue can be damaging. I remember warnings and pubic service messages about the danger of inhaling that glue.
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maybe that explains my strangeness?
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I have a deadline that I’m procrastinating on right now. I get SNAP benefits (what used to be food stamps) and I have a form I need to fill out and send in. Not supposed to sign it before Dec 31st, that’s no problem. Supposed to get it to them by January 8… I better get cracking on that, since I haven’t started to fill it in yet.
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I put them on the calendar and then procrastinate as long as is humanly possible, unless it’s something I just love to do – then I do it right away (or as soon as other commitments allow).
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Things that have firm deadlines are the most likely things I’ll finish. If there’s no deadline, it’s gonna be not he “someday” list.
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