Every Burden is a Blessing

That is what Q-bert's fortune cookie said last night, and I thought it was a perfect end to yesterday.

My Dad is a car fanatic. Seriously! I mean he comes from a family all with their own addictions, and cars are his. He owns a car restoration shop. He spends several nights a week going to cruise nights around town, and he spends nearly every weekend at a car show. So you can imagine his summers are just a giant string of car related experiences. For him they all lead up to HIS car show. He belongs to a group of other car addicts, and every summer around this time of year they host their own car show. When it started I was fairly involved with helping in many different ways (making flyers, assembling goodie bags, helping the photographer, etc.) All that changed when I had kids. They took up a lot of my time, and so I couldn't really devote any time to the car show. Until this year...

I really wanted to say NO when my Dad asked, but he never says no when I ask him for something, and so I nodded. What he was asking was kind of huge. The man who runs the photography booth at the car show was not able to do it this year, and so my Dad wanted me to do it. He gave me plenty of notice, and so I had plenty of time to dread it. And dread it I did. Every once in a while it would creep into my mind, and my stomach would tie itself into knots. It had been so long since I had even helped out at the photo booth. My only memories were of dealing with exceptionally picky car buffs. Also, the man who normally runs the booth is extremely disorganized, and I remember it being very hard to keep everything straight. So as the summer pressed on I kept praying for rain!

As it turns out my fears were totally unfounded. Thanks to my husband the tech guru organizing the picture files was a piece of cake. I also had a moment of brilliance in organizing the preview sheets. Plus, my uncle stepped up and ran the customer side of things so perfectly that I had no worries at all. Also, the picture quality was great which led to many satisfied customers. In fact, the only problem at all was that the humidity kept the pictures from drying as quickly as we would have liked. We made more money than I was expecting too; and my dear husband, who worked every bit as hard as I did, gave me all the profits to use on our house. So all my dread was for nothing.