Strong Love: This is RubyK

Have you ever wondered what might happen when a 19yr old and 22 yr old spend a large amount of time together and befriend each other through the winter months? No, not a life long romance... because you see these people are both females. Instead... A business! Yep, through a lot of creative ingenuity and lots of down time... Ruby K was birthed!

I'm not going to start for the beginning today because its really unexciting. Installment 1 is dedicated to Ruby K Designs first business trip!

Monday April 25 Jamie called me up and we decided it was time for a pow wow. We realized, after all the Easter festivities that we actually had a lot of work to do before a Tuesday trip. We were really sort of caught of guard. But I mean really it wasn't that disconcerting. We really just made some last few earrings, created our display and printed out a picture of our logo to frame beside our display. TADA. Then I think we ate pound cake and went to bed.

The alarm went off at 6:15am but I didn't get up until 6:45. heh. And I forgot my hair spray so my hair was a little poofy, a little wavy, and a little flat. Not what I anticipated for a day of first impressions. And it was raining. And it was cold. And we forgot my ipod adapter, and couldn't find another one. But we did get a warm cup of coffee from Stick Boy and hit the foggy road by 7:30(ish).

I drove to Winston where we had another coffee break. Jamie drove the rest of the way, and we got followed for a short distance by a cop. FREAK OUT! haha She hadn't been speeding the whole time but she did a little bit of swerving once... she was convinced the cop was gonna give her a ticket because of it, so we slowed down to about 55mph. No worries, he passed us. :)

Once we got to Raleigh we had to find this warehouse that I called the day before in order to purchase some earring card holders for our display. This place was sketchy!!! There were tons of manicans and flashing neon signs inside, and out side it was a little deserted except for loading vans... creepy loading vans. But we marched in there and bought a 100 cards. Then marched right out quickly.

We meet up with Jamie's Aunt and had lunch with her cousins. We went to Five Guys Burgers and Fries. Delicious right?! Yes... except when you eat too many fries, like me. I confess! ok! haha So we still had to stamp our earring holders with our signature bird so Jamie let her cousin drive to the Nursery gift shop. Umm, I had forgotten why I usually dont read in the car. And I figured it out while I was stamping the cards... I got SOO car sick. Reeeally car sick. And when I feel bad I don't really talk. And I got really quiet. And the display we made looked worse and worse... Jamie thought I was super nervous, haha nope! I seriously thought I was going to throw up. Not good!

So we meet the gift shop manager and she is as nice as she can be. Too bad I wasn't feeling well and half our stuff was still in the car! I mean really? Yea, of course that would happen. I ended up being pretty successful with the small talk though, and after some discussion at the gift shop we went to Jamie's uncle's office for a further presentation. The big dog, the boss man of the whole home and garden center! This would've been intimidating, except that he was kin to Jamie, and already loved her. He was SO nice, and helpful and shared a lot of business wisdom with us (thank you!) and over all the second meeting boosted my moral a lot. Plus the motion sickness wore off and I had some diet coke so I was pretty much as good as new!:)

All in all we left Homewood with eight earrings out in the world to circulate around and frame the pretty little faces of women in Raleigh. On the way home we made big plans to get more displays into local venues before the summer starts and Jamie leaves for Liberia.

On the way home, since we didn't have an ipod, Jamie decided to read Crazy Love aloud. I love it! I loved that she willingly read it aloud too, so fun. We came to the conclusion though that we wanted to really act on the crazy love Jesus has for us. So! each month or two we will be high lighting one friend/missionary or organization that will be receiving a portion of our sales. This month it is Sarah who is in Holland attending a school of worship! Next month it will be our friend Heidi who will be visiting an orphanage in Mexico! and so on. This is really exciting to us.

We still have a few wrinkles to iron out, but all in all we drove home tired, a little quiet, thoughtful, and full of Whole Foods grocery snacks, YUM!

Below are some photos of the escapade. They're pretty funny. They really capture the fatigue and loopiness for the whole outing. Pretty priceless.