Sadly, I only get one day off this weekend. As I mentioned earlier, Sunday I get to spend the day at McCormick Place with my coworkers. I’m still looking forward to the Housewares show, but it foils any attempt at plans for Saturday night since I have to be up so damn early. At least it’ll be good to see what everyone else in the industry is doing in terms of advertising/packaging/etc.

Just for kicks, I stopped in at Toys-R-Us last night to check out packaging for toys and decided that I really want a shot at designing toy packaging. A lot of it is absolutely terrible, but there are a few designers out there doing sweet stuff. Who knows, maybe over the next year or so Gams will land a toy manufacturer as a client.

For now though, I’m off to dinner with my coworkers and the client who’s in town for the show this weekend. I don’t think I’ll stay out late, but it should be a fun evening.

Lots of craziness lately. Work is finally starting to settle down and I haven’t had to stay much past five for the past couple of days (with tonight being the exception). The majority of the work I’ve been doing has been getting one of our clients ready during these final days before the Chicago Home and Housewares Shows. Most of the work has been finished, but there are still a few projects left to get wrapped up. With any luck, everything will be taken care of by the end of day tomorrow. The show starts next week sometime and a few of us from the agency will be going next Sunday to check everything out. Oddly enough, I’m actually excited to go and check everything out.

More importantly though, tomorrow I am sitting down with the creative director for my first review since starting at Gams. It’s been a good six months, but I after putting in as much time as I have, I strongly feel that I am being extremely underpaid for the kind and amount of work that I’m doing at the agency. Hopefully, I’ll walk out feeling a little bit better about all of the overtime I’ve put in over the last few weeks and be taking home a significantly bigger check every two weeks.

My parents are coming into town this weekend, so I will probably be busy running around with them for the majority of it. They’re finally bringing my new G5. Although I love the portability of my Macbook Pro, it’ll be nice to have a beefier workstation set up at home for freelance work and whatnot.