Madison's a YarnMartian!

This week, Alex and I have a visitor from Orangeville, Ontario, Canada. It's our grand-daughter, Madison Snow. Madi's a great little kid who was excited about the prospect about coming to Ohio to work at Yarnmarket. The ladies at Yarnmarket were thrilled at having a nice little girl to make a fuss over because...well...as I've mentioned before, being an online company we don't get a lot of visitors and we long for human companionship.

Madi got up bright and early this morning and could hardly wait to get to work. When she arrived, she was overjoyed to discover her own little work station where she was to pack up boxes to prepare them for Marlon, our wonderful UPS guy.

Lisa, Lynn and Pat went out of their way to make sure Madi was warmly welcomed to Yarnmarket. Pat created a special sign for her cubicle. Lynn and Lisa prepared packing lists and even created special "flower top" pens for Madi to sign,"Thank you from Madison" on her orders, and Lynn also arranged for a lunch for all of us -- complete with her delicious home-made macaroni salad. Lisa's 17-year old son, Patrick, dropped by with samples of beverages he makes at the local slushie parlor. Mmm... He even had one that promotes weight loss. (Yes, that's the one I chose. Do I look any thinner?)

Madi now thinks that work is great because you get to eat lunch for free and it even includes slushies and cupcakes.

Madi's first job was to take her orders into the warehouse and find the yarns for them. She was thrilled to discover that among the products she was to pull was a pattern for "Madison's Scarf" .

Once she'd collected all the yarns, she learned from Lisa how to pack them up and sign her thank you, and then put her box into the UPS bag to await Marlon's arrival this evening.

Have you ever noticed how Lisa seems to get into an awful lot of our photos? She's also in the Yarnmarket introduction for the upcoming Knitting Daily TV show. But you never see her face because she's always hard at work. One of these days we'll have to get her to turn around for the camera.

Anyway, Madison has had a great day helping us out and entertaining the ladies with her singing, dancing and -- we suspect -- whispered comments that her grand-parents are raving lunatics. (Yesterday we taught her that the three most important qualities a girl can have are: intelligence, niceness and anti-magnetism...because if you're not anti-magnetic, you'll get stuck to the fridge every time you walk by it.)

I don't know what it is about Alex and me but we have so much fun saying the most absurd things to our kids and grandkid. A while back, we had our middle daughter, Laura, convinced that the world was switching to metric time. 100 minutes to the hour. 10 hours to the day. 10 days to the week. We worked out the most complex story and acted absolutely shocked that she hadn't heard about it. We told her we'd converted and were finding it difficult to adjust to the sleeping schedule. We figure she'll forgive us for this by...oh...2010.

Well, it's almost closing time and Madi's put in a full day so I guess I'd better go find her. She's a bright little girl and is probably re-structuring the company while Grandma and Grandpa are glued to their computers.

Thanks for helping us, Madi. You made a wonderful YarnMartian!