So, were you out shopping over the weekend? I was. On Friday particularly. Among several stops, I was at Woodfield Mall outside of Chicago. I seem to have heard that Woodfield is the #1 tourist destination in Illinois. More people visit the mall than the Sears Tower or any other tourist attraction you can think of.

When we arrived, we found the parking lot was crowded. But we got lucky and found parking without much hassle. We had a quick lunch and headed into the mall at about 12:30pm. The mall was definitely crowded, but not terrible. It was more like a very crowded Sunday than what you would expect on the busiest shopping day of the year. The good news was that most people were carrying bags. People were not just walking and window shopping. They looked like they were buying.

At one store, they had a really good selection of Lafayette Puzzle Factory puzzles. They even had some on an end cap. Even better was that the inventory looked to be running a bit low. But with a little reshelving by myself and my mother (who is a puzzle expert), we had the shelves looking first rate.

What was really fun was watching people select puzzles. Especially when they would select LPF puzzles without my prompting. I also could not help myself and make a few recommendations.

There was one young girl who I watched select a puzzle. She spent a lot of time checking out each and every puzzle. She ultimately selected a great panoramic puzzle by Robin Koni. It is a very colorful underwater scene. It was quite pleasing to watch this transaction unfold. Especially since I remember our team picking this image for our puzzles over a year ago. We probably looked at hundreds and hundreds of underwater art scenes before we picked Robin's.

A year later, watching someone select that image over the 200 other puzzles in this store was really quite satisfying.

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving.

JP

Happy Black Friday!

Have you ever heard of Flat Stanley? I must admit to only being vaguely familiar with him until this week.
Flat Stanley came to visit us from my niece in Cincinnati.
I'll let Wikipedia to explain Flat Stanley: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Stanley

Anyway, I had a trip planned to Toronto last week and I took Flat Stanley with me. We had a great time. Stanley is pretty small and slips easily into my computer case. He also provided me with a good excuse to ask for silly things from officials.

I asked the pilot if we could take Stanleys picture on the flight deck.

I asked the immigration guy if he would "stamp" Flat Stanley. Apparently, he can not. But he did do a stamp half on Stanleys leg and half off the leg. It is ok to have a half stamp on a non-passport. I think Stanley was ok with that.

Yesterday, we took Stanley over to Purdue University to have his picture taken around campus.

I have been going non-stop the last 2 weeks. In the last 2 weeks, I have driven over 1200 miles (I flew to Toronto, so this is not even including those miles). Having Flat Stanley with me the last few days was a nice distraction. And hopefully explains my lack of posts.

I have had some really nice conversations with folks who have been buying our puzzles. The response has been really positive. And it is incredibly the depth of knowledge folks have about puzzles. Every conversation I have with someone about puzzles is an education.

Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving. If you are traveling, travel safe. It is rainy here in Lafayette. We are driving to the Chicago suburbs later today. I imagine traffic in Chicago will be a mess.

JP