Blog # 218 I talked about John starts designing the boxes for us. In this blog I want to talk about Back to Milan and the Micam Show.

I get back for a few weeks then off to Milan again. This wasn’t helping my marriage… Joanna informs me she isn’t going to make the move to Vegas due to family and gives her notice. I really liked her too. She was professional and had a lot of knowledge about first cost business. It was a tremendous loss for us, but family comes first. I had made up my mind I was going to Las Vegas, but the question was whether my family was too.

I get to Milan and chill out the first night as I was wiped out due to jet lag the first day. The next day would be a full day at the show. I get to the show the next day and first on my agenda is to negotiate smaller minimums from more suppliers. I was successful with most of them. We were able to write 18 prs per color now if the total order was 500 prs. Sometimes all you have to do is ask. China was another story, but we would work on that too.

After a long day, Nick, Richard, and I decide to go to a soccer game. We get to the stadium and decide to buy some jerseys to fit in with the crowd.  We asked the guy what jersey we should buy, and we all decided to get the same one.  It was Inter-Milan vs. Florence. We get to our seats and notice everyone near us was wearing the opponent’s jersey, oops… We had everything you could conceive of thrown at us during the game. Even a few bottles…There was M-80’s blown up down at the field level and fireworks galore. It was scary fun.

Later after the game we had a few beers at a local place near the hotel and had some laughs on how we survived that. We all laughed at how Richard had more stuff thrown at him than Nick and I. At least we didn’t get hurt and no fights either.

We get back to the hotel and meet up with Fred and Steve for a few drinks and tell them about our adventure. As we were all going up the elevator, Steve drops his phone and by some fluke it fits through the small space between the elevator and the elevator shaft. We had to get the hotel to retrieve it for him and by some miracle it wasn’t broken. It was the strangest thing we ever saw and still talk about it today.

The next day Richard and I take a car the agent sent us to go to Florence. We met up with Gabrielle from the Lady’s shoes factory and had a nice dinner. We would see them the next day to work the line. We spent the whole day there and informed them about Joanna leaving which they were sad to hear. They had a great relationship with her.

We would go back to Vegas and have about a month before the China trip in April. I needed to hire someone quick and fit in a Disneyland trip for my kid’s during Spring break. I had some candidates lined up for interviews when I got back.

 I was so tired during the Disneyland adventure I felt like a zombie. It was great spending quality time with my kids though. My daughter Jennifer loves Disneyland and seeing her happy meant a lot to me. James was getting to the point he would like the scarier rides which I’ll admit aren’t my thing. I have a fear of heights so some rides I try to avoid.  I did it anyways just to fight my fears.

We had a really good time together, but I knew the marriage wasn’t going to survive. We had grown apart and with all my travels it was just as much my fault too. My next China trip was for three weeks this time. I had to firm up some QC things and make sure the gel for Fitzwell was going to work out. I would also be doing a lot of thinking of my future on this trip.