Geez, I just wanted to share some recently-acquired knowledge with you. Anyhow, here it is:
Everybody knows that Renaissance Festivals are a wonderful place to market your whistles. What not everybody knows, is that Renaissance Festival PLAYERS are possibly wanting our work even more. I do the Kansas City Renaissance Festival, and many of my colleagues there buy from me every season. I discount my whistles for them, because quite a number of 'em are kind of on financial “short rations”.
Another thing that goes overlooked is that many Renfest businesses have like, Yahoo groups, to contact the players. KC does, for certain. If you know a RenFest player, he/she may be able to post an offer from you to the group, giving them a discount from your business.
That’s the sum and substance of what I would’ve said to you in my email, had the original post not gone missing - no commercial from me, nothing that you couldn’t figger out for yourself, but I just already know about it, and wanted to share without engendering a whole bunch of posts on a topic that most wouldn’t find very interesting. I picked the wrong way to say it, and for that, I apologize, both to you, and to Dale.
That reminds me. I don’t think Mouse has ever tasted chocolate. I’ll leave a chocolate chip with his sunflower seeds. (Remember, it was Ralph I’s love of chocolate that got this tradition started.)
Hmmm… my High School biology teacher told us that chocolate would kill mice.
Unfortunately, this was after he found out we fed one of his caged mice an M&M, and sure enough, the poor little guy was near death the next morning.
It made a yummy chocolate-flavored snack for his pet python, which was it’s designated fate before the M&M incident anyway!
He said that chocolate clogged up their bowels, and they died from constipation… and he found absolutely no humor in my suggestion that chocolate Ex-Lax should remedy the problem! :roll:
Maybe wild mice are heartier creatures than the pet store variety… and then maybe my High School biology teacher was just an idiot!
The reason I started leaving food for him was, after I put the pantry food in mouseproof containers, he ate a hole in one of Arleen’s purses to get at the chocolate inside.
After I had him trained to take his meals in my office, I left an M&M for him. Being a meadow mouse, less timid and secretive than a deermouse, he came and got the M&M while I was watching him. Started to chew into it and then gave me an embarrassed look before sort of dribbling it, mouseketball style over to a place where I couldn’t see him. The crunching noises continued for several minutes.
I fed the occasional chocolate chip to Ralph II, but Gus wasn’t around long enough for me to offer him any. Before I started recruiting mice for the Global Pennywhistle Tweaking Research and Production Consortium Headquarters staff, we found that one of Arleen’s suitcases had been visited by a mouse who had worked his way through a good sized Hershey bar.
Nasty Weeks! Nasty and cruel. The only mouse killing trap I’ll contemplate is feline, and we have plenty of those.
Once my cousin who was a bit overly enchanted with explosives made a trap using industrial strength cardboard tubing, cut into a small segment, with a trigger and gunpowder. He intended for the tube to contain the explosion. It didn’t. Mess.
I like mice, actually, and rescue them from cats when I can.
Thanks, John! How much do I owe you? I don’t have any stamps, but maybe Jerry will lend me one so I can send you some sunflower seeds. Do you like peanut butter?
As part of our ongoing discussion of thread creep, I would like to point out that this thread, purported to be about marketing pennywhistles, has been hijacked by a mouse who, I’m sorry to say, has never indicated the slightest interest in either pennywhistles or marketing.
I would certainly guess so. We had to put the candy, and specifially the chocolate, into mouse and rat proof containers because the field rodents were coming into the building and chowing down!!!
There are only two things about my whistle playing that my wife doesn’t like. One of those things is that she blames me for the mouse infestation we’ve been suffering. She think’s I’m the pied piper.
This impression was cemented after I told her about the time I was noodling away on my whistle in the study when out from behind one of the bookcases pops a little mouse. Mostly out of surprise I kept noodling. The mouse stood there, resting on its little back paws and stared at me. I stopped. It continued to stare for a moment. (I remember this clearly - my brain, for whatever reason, is thinking, “What do we do with a drunken sailor?”) Appearently deciding I won’t be playing again soon, the little weasle turns his back and wanders off through the door. No rush, just a waddling little mousey ramble. I immediately poked my head out of the door but the devil had managed to pull a Houdini and disappear in an empty hallway.
We’ve been evicting the little barstards ever since.
