Winding Down

This week is just a lot of packing up and shoving things into deep dark corners to be lost until next year when we try to find them again and can't. I've spent a lot of time playing real life Tetris and trying to fit a lot of things into spaces that are way too small. We also helped out the Schlep guys this morning because half of their crew is hurt or sick. So, I've spent a lot of the morning lugging things around. Now, I'm headed over to do some paperwork. Hooray!

Lazy Sunday

Today I wandered down to the end of town to take a look at Bridal Veil Falls. It was only about a fifteen minute walk past the end of the business district, but I hadn't walked down there since my first year out here. It was such a beautiful day and when you get past Town Park, it gets so quiet and you really feel like you're in the middle of nowhere. There are a few houses and I saw one or two cars, but it's pretty uninhabited. I saw about a million chipmunks. They were very, very cute and chubby. The building at the top of the falls was once a power plant and is now a house. If you saw the movie The Prestige they did a really crazy shot running up the waterfall to this house. I can't imagine living up there. And, apparently, the people who live there have small children. What a weird place to grow up. From time to time, when it snows a lot, these people get completely stuck in their house. They did install some sort of zip line like escape chair to get out, but it just seems like a really odd place to live. I think it actually might be for sale. Can you blame them?

Last night was the annual Schlep Wedding. This is the fourth year in a row that the guy that runs the Schlep Crew, Timmy, has gotten married...to a woman. Timmy's gay and will not hire anyone to his crew sight unseen, therefore, he has this crew made up of amazingly good-looking 20 to 30 year old guys. The Schlep Wedding is always the best party of the year and this one didn't disappoint. It was a really good end to a very stressful week.

Now I'm off to our 10am Meeting...otherwise known and the Guiness Breakfast. (Yes, there is a bar here that opens at 10am).

There is a major communication gap in this festival and it completely messed me up this morning. As I walked over to breakfast at 8am, I got a phone call from one of the guys at the Conference Center. It went like this:

Him: I'm sorry to bother you so early, but I just got here and I'm a little concerned that no one is here yet.
Me: Confused pause
Him: You know you need to be completely cleared out of here by 11am, right?
Me: No, I didn't know that.
Him: Well, your boss knew.
Me: Well he didn't tell me.

So, I go to breakfast completely annoyed, scarf down a bagel, tell the guy who distributes the labor pool that I need a ton of people and run to the Gondola to head up the mountain. We were completely cleared out at 10:53am. The wonderfully helpful Tami and I carried 1500 pounds worth of sandbags up a staircase and into the booth where they get stored in about 20 minutes. It was an incredibly crazy few hours and I was so exhausted when we were done. This all could have been avoided with just a phone call from my boss or someone at the Conference Center, where I've been working all week, saying, "by the way, did you know you need to be out of here by 11am on Friday?" I'm not quite sure where the communication breakdown occurred, but it made my morning pretty hellish.

In other news, tonight is the biggest party of the film festival year so all of this will be forgotten very soon!

Apparently

People really like us around here until this thing actually starts coming apart. Then, they just want us out of the way. We've had a pretty icy reception at the Conference Center all week. I don't know what the change was, but all of a sudden, they just seem to want us gone. So much so that they called my boss yesterday to ask when we would be done even though I gave them a schedule three weeks ago that said we'd be out by today (Friday). I was also at the Conference Center all day yesterday and talked to every person that works there and no one ever asked me...they just called my boss. It wasn't that I got in trouble (in any way, shape, or form), it was just incredibly annoying.

So, today, about ten of us are going up to just rip the thing apart. There are actually only three things left to do and we should be done by early afternoon. I'm so ready to be out of that place and not have to deal with these people anymore.

Tonight is also the big party of the year. It's a wedding where a gay man will be marrying his fourth wife. It's a tradition that started a while ago and it always turns out to be the most fun party of the year. Sorry I've been so lazy about posting lately, but we've just been so busy and I've been so tired! I'll get better about it...and then I'll be home and I'll have nothing to write about anymore!

Alright kids

It's been a while since I've updated, but the weekend was pretty insane so I haven't really had a chance to sit down and process the whole thing. I saw some really great movies. The absolute best I saw was one called Slumdog Millionaire. There is no way this film won't come out into wide release, but I highly recommend it when it does! It was easily the best thing I saw at the festival. A lits of the other great things I saw:

The Good, The Bad, and The Weird.

and

Happy Go Lucky.

Yesterday and today have been a whirlwind of breakdown. It's amazing how quickly these things go up and then how incredibly quickly they come down. We learned from the Conference Center today that we couldn't use the lift this afternoon or at all tomorrow. That serioulsy screwed up my schedule, but it turns out that the entire rigging crew is scheduled to be in Mountain Village on Friday so we'll be okay. That means we should be able to get a lot done on Friday that I would have spread out over two days. If I'm lucky, we'll be pretty done by Friday and I can spend next week catching up on the paperwork I haven't come anywhere close to updating in the past three weeks!