Today I received a copy of Yuuyake Shimbun, which covered my trip to Portland and printed an article that also looks similar to my press release. The full-color ad looks pretty good in newsprint; I was a little nervous about that since I know newsprint is a little absorbent and tends to have pretty poor dynamic range. The adjustments my designer made for that factor seem to be just about right.

I also sent Maersk a bunch of money to cover customs duties and freight forwarding fees for the first shipment, which Maersk is trying to clear today. Alas, the FDA is reviewing the shipment documents and will either review the documents and release it, or they may take samples, which will cost me more money. I'm just glad I didn't let Yamato route this through Los Angeles or this would be very messy.

There's another shipment due to arrive in Seattle tomorrow which may or may not be cleared in time for the fair.

July 4 I made something of a galette with ricotta, parmesan, rosemary, roasted patty pan squashes, caramelized onions, and spanish almonds. It turned out ok; the patty pan squashes didn't seem as fresh as I had hoped. Anyway, I brought it over to a party in Wallingford right on Lake Union to which Amelia arranged invitations. I saw my graphic designer Jennifer there, and Denise, a dot-com veteran who now works for Microsoft, whose home had been the paddling-off point for the Independence Day party last year. I brought Kazue along also. It turns out that the host works for Expeditors International, so his company may also be useful to arrange air transport for me.

After the fireworks, we spend some time chatting with those who didn't leave straightaway, and then a few of us walked over to another party a few blocks away hosted by a friend of a friend. I was already sleepy, maybe because of the lingering effects of my late night adventure with Yamato. Someone was convinced I was drunk because I was slumped in a chair and relatively unanimated... in fact, I had only consumed one glass of wine the whole evening and it was a couple of hours prior. Christopher, A musician or audio sculptor I've met at previous Amelia-connected events, was there; I've not seen him in quite a while, though I was perhaps too sleepy to appreciate being there. Anyway, we departed around 3am or so, and I finally arrived home after dropping folks off sometime around 3:30 am.

July 5 was a slow day, too. Thanks to two late nights in less than a week, I really didn't wake up at a healthy time of day. I also slept earlier than usual, unwittingly falling asleep on my smaller sofa around 10pm. I'm guessing I'll be overwhelmingly busy over the next couple of days.

Yesterday and today I received the necessary equipment and documentation for processing credit cards, so I should be ready to handle non-cash transactions at the summer festival. I am supposed to get telephone training on how to use a telephone-based card entry system this Friday. I also received the materials for setting up my booth display at the summer festival. They look good, though I'm wondering how the backdrop banner will hold up if we have any wind.

Friday morning I got an account established with Maersk Logistics and I filed the necessary paperwork to allow them to clear my shipment at customs. I was impressed at how on top of things their staff seems to be. They advised me of some corrections needed in the shipping invoice to reduce the risk of being held up at customs, and kept me informed about the status of FDA notification, the anticipated schedule fo transport, and so on. By 6:45 pm I got a confirmation email that the shipment was on its way and they provided an ETA.

Yesterday afternoon in the mail I received a copy of the Chinese newspaper which is carrying my ad. They seem to have given me complimentary spot color... they just decided on areas that they thought should be highlighted. I hope the ad reaches the right audience.

In the afternoon I met with Patrick at the Queen Mary tea shop and restaurant a short stretch from University Village. We tried what turned out to be a green tea from an all-organic Taiwanese farm I met with in Japan, and a moderately fragrant oolong recently added to Queen Mary's collection. I think I wasn't expecting a green tea, since my poor Japanese ability led me to believe all of the products the Taiwanese farm sells are oolongs. Since I haven't consumed a lot of Chinese-style green tea, and since the two teas were so different from each other, I found it hard to compare the two. The tea, called “four seasons-spring,“ was much different in character than any Japanese green teas that I drink.

The actual oolong from Queen Mary's was nice, but a little tannic for my taste and, although much better than average oolong, not quite as fragrant as the one I tried at FoodEx. I'll have to break out the two teas actually labeled oolong to find out if I can reproduce the quality of the ones I tasted when I was at the trade show.

In the evening I met with a Korean woman who is interested in helping me out with the summer festival event, and seems like she'd be a good addition. Long term, she may also be helpful in doing some web design and web marketing for Yuzu Trading Co, as that's close to what her day job is. It turns out she also knows some people that I am connected with, including two people at Azuma Gallery and also Eugene, the MyGreenTea guy. I'm starting to think that Eugene knows everybody...

I was incredibly tired last night because of my relative lack of sleep, and found myself driving back from Bellevue to Seattle in pretty bad shape. I still stayed up a little bit later, which was probably not very smart, but somehow driving that short stretch made me a little wired. Today I'm doing very little work, and I am not doing anything actively leisure-like... just decompressing.

The last three days I've been struggling with my air freight service, Yamato Transport, as they've managed to royally mess up the shipment of my dragon beard candy. They failed to arrange service on June 30 because of China Airlines had some reluctance to handle food shipments to the U.S., and they didn't arrange a backup in time to ship that day, and didn't inform my supplier of the problem until the air cargo offices were closed for the day. July 1, of course, happened to be a public holiday in Hong Kong, and so I heard zero news from Yamato yesterday until evening, when my supplier and I started beating up the Yamato Hong Kong office by telephone and email. By 11 pm here, or about 3 pm Hong Kong time, Yamato had finally gotten some sort of arrangement, but they had been so slow to inform us about what was going on that we didn't trust them to complete the shipment successfully anymore.

Yamato, once they got arrangements confirmed, also neglected to follow my instructions to get the product here as directly as possible, instead trying to route the cargo through Los Angeles and truck it up to Seattle. Since Monday, July 5 is a public holiday in the United States, customs clearance would be unlikely to be complete until at least Wednesday. That means, if all went smoothly, the product would be in my hands on Friday, which is one day before the street fair where I'm debuting the product.

So last night, Dragon Rich, the dragon beard candy maker in Hong Kong, contacted their usual freight forwarder, Maersk, to seek another freight arrangement option in parallel, and by 3 AM Seattle time had made arrangements to transport to Vancouver, BC by air, most likely on Saturday morning Hong Kong time. It should only take four hours or so for the surface transport from Vancouver, so customs clearance on Monday or Tuesday should be the end point of the critical path instead of another two days of surface transport. My supplier's diligence about arranging an alternative was truly impressive and they took some financial risks on my behalf, which I really appreciate.

I dozed off a couple of times between 1 am and 3 am, but around 3:30 or so I was finally able to sleep after the marketing manager in Singapore had clarified the most important details. I got about 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep, but at least I have some confidence that my shipment will get here in time.

All of the advertisements were ready to go on Tuesday and some publicity was arranged. On Wednesday, the Northwest Asian Weekly asked me to bring them some other photos for a story they were running, so I went down there and took some product shots. The newspaper came out Thursday morning. It turns out the story is very similar to my press release, so it was kind of a funny experience reading it.