Deadline

Today’s the day. Today’s the day that we open registration for Sock Summit 2011.  Last night when we were sure we were done getting ready, and Stephen had gone to bed, and the world started closing in a bit and we started to feel nervous.  We went outside because the best antidote to feeling like the world is really small is to go look at a great big sky, and we stood there and looked at the stars and Tina looked at me and said, "Why are we doing this to ourselves again?"

Last time registration was so hard. I don’t want to talk about how or why because the juju is so good on this one that I don’t want to invoke ghosts, so let’s just say it was hard. We’ve made a million changes to the system, spent a ton of money making sure this one won’t be hard, and now it all comes down to this, and here’s the crazy part.  Last night, when we were listing off everything that could go wrong today, what it really came down to, what were really afraid of surprised us. 

We’re not afraid of losing money.  (Okay. We’re really afraid of that, but there are worse things than losing a lot of money. We could find a way to make more money, and while it might wipe out all our savings- our families wouldn’t starve.) We’re not afraid of being embarrassed (much.) We’ve both been embarrassed before and we lived.  We’re grown up women. We’ll get through. We talked and talked – what were we afraid of.  What was so scary that two mature women would stand in the night staring at the sky? 

It came to us.  It’s that what we really valued about the last Sock Summit was the community. It was being allowed to invest in the teachers careers, and show people a good time, and support the vendors and try to invest in this industry and community in a way that helped create that community and industry, because if we don’t support it, it won’t be there, and both Tina and I love it and have based lives on it… and with that. We knew why we were scared.

We don’t want to let you all down.
We hope we don’t.
We’ve tried not to. 
Wish us luck.