Happy First Day of Spring!

It was beautiful outside and I was happy that I was able to get to be outside for a couple of hours today.

I had thought I had a webinar this morning, but couldn’t find a payment or a notice for me to sign on to it, so did some accounting that I needed to catch up on instead. Found most of the items I had forgotten to take to my accountant the other day and put them where I wouldn’t forget them again.

Gathered items I needed to take for remeasuring The Fields Park in Manitou Springs for Commonwheel’s 40th Annual Labor Day Weekend Arts Festival. Grabbed a couple of old maps, printed a smaller one, but didn’t end up using that one. I had some old flags to help us get a feel for where booths would go and how much space the Beer Garden and the Stage would take up. Not a perfect park for this, but we’ll see how it all works out on paper after I work on it at home.

As I waited for the other Festival Committee members to show up, tried to get a feel for how the Beer Garden, Stage Area, Food Court and Kids Activity areas would all work together. A Raven posed for me on the grass. Not sure what exactly he was gathering, but may have a few fun pictures. Put the camera in the car and walked with the girls to talk about different ideas I had about the areas. They had some different thoughts than what I had, but will have to see how the rest of the park gets laid out and where the Beer Garden goes to really determine what will work best for the Kid’s Art and Activity booths.

As we were talking, at least 6 deer showed up in the Park among these trees where the Food Court had been in 2013. I enjoyed seeing them, but no photos again.

The girls had a totally different vision for how to lay out the booths in the park. It was one I had toyed with last year, but couldn’t get myself to do such a radically different set-up than what was in the park the Festival had been held in for 38 years. They easily convinced me to measure and mark the park in a totally different configuration and see how it felt. Looking at the empty park, it looked both small and large. Nothing to do but give it a try. I could feel myself resisting a bit, but they have been doing more fairs recently than I, so we started measuring and discussing how to make it work in this new configuration.

And then there is the challenge of trees and sloping ground. They both convinced me that I give way more attention to placing artists where they want to be than any other art festival they have ever participated in. I had done a horseshoe configuration of booths along the sidewalk areas facing in and a center grouping of back to back booths. There hadn’t been enough pathways for artists when setting up and breaking down. And some felt it was a bit maze-like in one area.

I did my best with only a day to determine if the park would work, then get it measured and laid out in less than 2.5 weeks after the August 8, 2013 flooding that destroyed Manitou Springs Memorial Park where we had held the Art Festival for 38 years. I did the best I could, and the public was very happy at this park, many comments on how it looked like we had been here for years.

The girls wanted to look at doing rows of booths from sidewalk to sidewalk, using the sidewalks as turn around points. The tree areas actually sort of worked as we measured it out, and when we counted at the end, it does look like there will be enough booth spaces.

It took almost exactly the 2 hours I had predicted. And they were really fun and joyful people to work with on this project. It will be interesting to see how it actually lays out on paper when I can work on that this weekend. But this park has many sloping places, and some of the best shade areas will not be used for booth, should be interesting.

I knew I had some errands to run and tried to determine how many I could do and get back to my home in time for my 3rd Tony Laidig webinar this week. I dropped off the items at my accountant’s office, went across town to Tandy’s where they had a Leather Punch on sale for a really, really good price. Then back to Costco to pick up some food items and cooked chicken for dinner.

Got home with about 20 minutes to spare. I was pretty hungry, so ate some chicken, got the items that needed to be kept cold in the fridge and sat down about 3 minutes before the start of the webinar. Whew!

I had thought I might make it to the MAT tonight, but Tony’s webinar “Easy Book Content Creation” went on for 2 hours, ending right when the show would be beginning. He shared some of his most favorite and hoarded secrets about using Public Domain content to create books that are unique and easier to write than if you did all the writing yourself.

Looking around my office, I see so much Public Domain materials just waiting to be re-purposed. This was suppose to be my month for doing that, but the Festival and the 40th Anniversary Gallery Show has really taken on more time than I had meant for it to take this month, this year, etc. But it needs to be done, and I am the one that can do it, so I just have to know I will get to it as soon as possible and that it is not procrastination, but hours of important work that I am doing right now to clear the path for my future focus on writing again.

A revelation I had the other day that was perfect to share with one of these ladies when she said she didn’t feel like she was contributing to the Festival committee because all the answers to her phone calls had been “no”, and hadn’t found a solution for the lack of internet. I told her that everything she had done, was something that needed to be done to learn that answer, and for us to know we had to look somewhere else, rather than hang on to the hope that this would work for too long to find a solution. She thanked me for putting this perspective on what she had done.

My revelation was that even though I had many things I needed and wanted to do, when I looked back at all I had done, I felt a sense of accomplishment rather than being upset at what wasn’t done. Much better way to view life when one is working hard and keeps moving forward to reach their goal.

Once again, I am a bit exhausted, but want to do a couple of posts for the Spirit Renewing Hikes Blog before I go to sleep tonight.