8/5/13, day one: I set my alarm for six in the morning. For some reason, the night prior, I'd thought I'd need that much time to shower and eat before driving to Camas, WA before 9:00, when my first appointment was. I was very wrong about that, and ended up sitting on my couch playing solitaire for 45 minutes.

  Camas is a small town next to Vancouver; there's really not much to it. And the directions to the appt led me far beyond Camas, into the woods. Deeper and deeper into the woods I went, until I found the address: a decent looking house (right next to one a few shades away from a shack). T was standing out in the driveway waiting for me, with a card table set up in her garage.

  T* was pleasant, mid 60's, grey hair, standard grandma look. She makes jewelry that she sells online, and at gift shows. As I put the bead crates in front of her, she was very hesitant to go through them throughly, like most customers do. Despite my repeated invitations to make a mess, and pile up the unwanted beads on the table, she just skimmed through the top two inches of the crate, and sometimes set aside a few strands to buy. She did this with nearly every box in the van (about 25), but when I tallied up her total, she ended up spending only $380. I packed up, thanked her, and got the hell out of the woods.

  After a brief chat with my boss on the phone (where he assumed that I'd never driven a car before, apparently, and informed me not to use the cruise control when driving the van up a steep hill. Yeah, duh), I drove to Vancouver. The names of the appts in the schedule always have names that sound like they're going to be actual shops, and I had hopes that this one would be a business. It was not. Another house call, this time in a nice, large home with a two car detached garage. J's daughter, B, answered the door and found her mom, who showed me how to get into the kitchen where we would be looking over the beads. J was in good shape, mid 40's, with some old, half blown out tattoos here and there. 

  My fears that this sale would be another wash would quickly dispelled as J went through the fire polish and pulled out what added up to more than T had spent altogether. And she kept at it. Again I pulled out almost every box in the van, but J was making piles of them so quickly, I barely had time to bag, and tag them. All the while, we chatted about how she ended up being a bead vendor (a lot of home buyers are that: they buy the beads wholesale, then mark them up to sell online), how she and her husband were triathletes, how B was about to head to college to become a physician's assistant (different from a registered nurse because you can only work for a private practice, not a hospital), and how her wiener dogs were all going to miss her.

  By the time she finished, J had spent $3494, and didn't even ask to split the total between two checks. After she showed me her bead warehouse (her basement, floor to ceiling with tiny bead drawers, I packed the van and headed home. In my limited experience, this was my biggest sale ever, meaning that for around six hours of work, I made $520. Not too shabby. As long as J's check doesn't bounce.

*names have been hidden because I don't know why. deal with it.