Dawn came early Saturday morning, or so it seemed. Tom and I trudged off the MegaCenter to get set up for the day.

We kind of underestimated how much space (or how little actually) existed on top of an 8 foot table. We were able to cram most of the stuff we bought on the table but had to hold some stuff back, hoping that we could free up space for Sunday by sales today.

Shortly after getting everything set up and arranged the sales started. We started selling to vendors an hour or two before the actual show opened. Meanwhile, potential customers were anxiously lining up waiting to get into the show.

Of course, once the doors opened, people began flocking in and the air became thick with the aroma of pipe smoke.

Given the competition for buyer's attention, I think we did ok but next year I feel that we should probably get two booths and devote one exclusively to Meerschaum products. It was good to see that we actually sold a couple of briars though. Hopefully people will be more likely to pull the trigger tomorrow. We definitely saw an upswing in action the closer we got to closing.

Today we sold today:

• all 5 of our Butane Pipe Lighter Inserts
• Sevket floral pipe
• Kaiser Wilhem meerschaum pipe with windscreen cap
• Estate Barling Pot
• Meerschaum bent panel pipe
• Estate Charatan Billiard #3102

James, one of our customers from the Barn and an up and coming pipe carver (we and he hopes) help out in passing out carver flyers about the PipeTrader.com site. This helped me hit up a number of potential carvers while I spent time either at the table or talking up the project with carvers exhibiting at the show.

Had an interesting discussion today with a company that is working with P&T magazine to create an application that talks directly to the upcoming P&T magazine website and, I believe, other sources as well. We began talks about carving out API's in our auction house technology to accept listings from their application to simplify postings as well as some other hooks. Got a lot of talking and programming to do before the release of PipeTrader.com.

Instead of attending the Cigar Dinner, we are going to be going out to dinner with the group of customers that ventured out to the show. I'll tell you more about this tomorrow. Gotta run out the door and eat some Chicago pizza so we'll type later!