My First Book Signing

Yesterday, the Pioneer Woman came to town, and I was sad because I was going to miss her.

I've been a fan of her cooking blog for a while now. I don't really follow her Confessions or photography stuff - I'm strictly here for the food. (I swear, that's going to be my epitaph!) She published a cookbook recently and one of the stops on her book tour was going to be not too far from where I live. I was so excited - a chance to meet THE Pioneer Woman!

Yes, I know I'm a geek, but so what?

Anyway, as the day for her signing approached, my excitement turned to sadness. As a lot of you know, we've been trying to clean up our finances here since the baby has been born, and that means cutting out a lot of our frivolous spending so that we can get the last of the credit cards paid off and current. You know what falls squarely into the frivolous spending category?

That's right. Cookbooks. And you can't go to a book signing without buying the BOOK!!! So, that meant no Pioneer Woman meet and greet for me. Phooey.

My friend saw my grouchy tweet about it that day, and asked why I couldn't go. I told her about not having the money for the book, so she said that she'd get it for me and we could go! I'm telling you, this girl is the BEST. I'm so glad to have her back! I jumped into the shower and headed over to her house so we could go together.

Luckily, I didn't know where the bookstore was exactly, so I looked up their website when I got to her house. There I noticed that you needed to buy tickets for the signing. I had never been to one before, so I had no idea! I was so bummed because I thought seating would be first come, first served. We called the store, and got our tickets and reserved a spot in our seating group - group H.

Since there was no rush to get there now, we had a bite to eat and then moseyed on over. We got in line to pick up our books and then decided to poke around the store for a bit. There was a line forming, but we didn't see the point in standing in line if they were seating in groups, so we decided to go browse. Some shriveled little hag of a woman started screeching at us as we made our way past - "YOU CANT CUT US! THE END OF THE LINE IS BACK THERE! WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING???" Um, okay, line police! We were going to SHOP. I'm sure the store employees had no problems with this, geez. Some people really need to unclench, you know? It wasn't even all that serious!

Well, after we had been looking around for a while, one of the employees made an announcement. Turns out, a bunch of people were tweeting about how pissed they were that they had to be seated in groups, and Pioneer Woman saw them so she called the store and told the employees that she wanted people seated first come, first serve.

Well, crap. So if we had gotten there early (aka our original plan) we would have gotten seats. Now for sure we were doomed to standing room only! Ah well. I told myself that I was just glad to get to be there! Finally they started letting people into the seating area and it got really crowded. I did bump into one of my sorority sisters in line though:

She's tall and skinny but I like her anyway.

Check out all the people. There had to be about 200 sitting and at least that many standing. I would not have been surprised if they had said 500 people showed. It was freaking HOT in there.

Finally at about 7:00, Ree came out and talked for a bit then took questions from the audience. She also had her mother in law and sister in law with her.

After that, it was time to settle in and get comfy. We had a looooong wait for our group to be called.

And here we are. That poor woman had stacks and stacks of books that people left to be signed because they didn't want to wait around. She said she was running on about three hours of sleep. We left there at about 10:30 and we were tired, so I can only imagine how bad she was feeling. She was very nice though.

I don't know if I'll ever go to another book signing again though.