Before the storm

Fringe Festival successful.  Seven shifts in Front of House Prep, nine or ten shows (depending on how you count). Merch and other goodies (including a hand-carved bone spaceship to celebrate Spaceship Man by Sound and Fury), lotta fun counting money and hassling people on and off the walkie. New friends made, old friends renewed.  Team Leader BBQ tomorrow, the semblance of a social life.

I spent Monday getting a massage and taking it relatively easy, in spite of the fruitflies taking over my apartment.  Tuesday noonish I went to the office and took care of a lot of stuff.  Tonight I stayed home and dithered, finally taking care of most of my backlogged e-mail correspondence as much as I'm going to.  (I still owe an editor a response on a revision of a revised manuscript, but I have to read (again) first.)

So tomorrow, I have an appointment with the endocrinologist, then perhaps breakfast and re-reading said paper, then some other work for which I might make it to the office if I really, really have to, and then the VTL BBQ.  No one wants to go to the zoo with me in the afternoon, so I'll probably skip unless something happens between now and then. 

Other stuff I need to remember to do soon: make a dentist appointment (it's been more than a year); clean the kitchen and hopefully get rid of the fruit flies once and for all; well, clean the whole apartment; get my list o' grad students and e-mail contacts on that front settled and set up; update the department website with next year's courses; update my website with a new spectrogram (for the first time in a year and a half; and the usual.

Argh.

Patrick K Hagiwara (1919-2010)

Well, I'm slowly catching up with my own life. The most important thing of recent note to mention is that my father passed away on June 24th. The obituary/tribute set up by the funeral home is perhaps the most complete. It was sad to say goodbye, of course, but wonderful to see so many relatives and old friends of the family. Also our new Rector (i.e. the Episcopalian analogue of a Parish priest) who was an enormous comfort to us, and enjoys a good laugh. Good qualities in a priest.

Am officially back from my "Research Leave" (sabbatical) as of July 1st, but haven't been to the office yet. Have apparently irrevocably lost the key to my office, so we'll have to get a replacement.

Have asked my Head to nominate committees for my remaining two students' MA thesis defenses, and with any luck at all we can get them both done and ootadere by the middle of August, and I can have a couple of weeks to just prep classes for September. And write the final report about my sabbatical.

But now is the middle of the 23rd annual Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival ("Fringe and Beyond"), at which I am again volunteering, this year (like last) in "Front of House Prep", a busy office where we reconcile all cash proceeds from the festival, manage performer and media services, and basically keep the place running for the 12 days of the festival. The nice thing about the job is a) I get to count a lot of money a lot of different ways, b) I work with people who for the most part know what they're doing and c) I don't ever have to deal with wet, angry patrons (or performers, or technicians) ever, ever again. The bad part of the job is that I'm not in charge of the walkie-talkie for the area, although I occasionally get to answer questions and make snarky announcements about properly voiding used-but-unsold tickets.

So that's all for now. Gotta see a man about some zzzzz. More next week maybe.