Post-con

I’m alive!! And I just had the kids carry all the boxes and crap out to the shed, which marks the official end of the event. I only have a few more payments left, and tackling the always insane hotel bill, but other than that I’m mostly done.

How did it go? It went well. I have to say it was probably the most incident-free; no problematic men to throw out, no major racial incidents unlike last year. The worst thing that happened was I got sick and lost my voice; couldn’t sing on Sunday night and could barely talk on the final two days, but all things considered I’ll happily take that over what happened last year. 

Financially it’s hard to say; there’s so much money still coming and going, and I don’t know where I’m going to land with the hotel bill. I’m tempted to say I’ll be about where I was last year. We’ll see in about a month when everything is cleared and paid and I can compare where I am to where I was last year at the same time. Obviously I made it through the whole year last year without borrowing ahead - even had enough to cover a $25,000 garage wall repair without going into debt - so I can manage another year like that. I think curbing our travel budget and other things like extravagant birthday parties and sleepaway camps really helps. It sucks not having extra, but right now I’m just glad to be surviving. 

The whole feel of the camp made me hopeful for the future, too - I don’t think I need to worry about this event fading away any time soon. There’s so much good will and joy around it; it’s something people depend on. I don’t think I’m going to lose more people next year. I think I’m either going to level out around 900 and stay there for a while or start gaining people back. I only lost 80 people from last year which is less than I’d anticipated. And the price increases helped stave off big losses. So I’m ok.

It was exhausting having to jump right into getting up at 7 to get kids to school all week - today was the first day I got to really sleep. Still fighting off whatever this lurgey is - I tested for covid and came up negative, so I think it’s just a nasty head cold. 

This year the kids were more on their own than ever - the H made a bunch of complicated projects for himself so wasn’t there to supervise them. Thankfully they played with some other Lindy hop kids that they see every year. I had told them that they’re going to have to take a little agency and get themselves down to the food room alone and grab a plate. I don’t know if they ever did this; I also don’t know if they ever brushed their teeth or put on sunscreen when they went to the pool. I guess this is the one time I get to experience hands-off 70s and 80s parenting wherein I don’t know where the kids are or what they’re doing. It’s weird, but I’m too busy to be concerned about it. 

It’s odd to think of a time, not too far off, when they won’t need to be driven home to go to school anymore or be picked up as we’re unloading the truck or, god forbid, not even come to the event at all because they’ve got their own stuff going on. That’s a profoundly bizarre thought but is pretty likely to happen - the day may come in just a few years where they really have nothing to do with it at all. I wish they had some interest in all this stuff, but they just don’t. Oh well! They want to make their own way in the world. I respect that. 

For now I’m too in the weeds of event wrap-up to even think about what’s next - visiting the cabin, our Christmas road trip, my fall garden - but hopefully in a week or two the fog will clear. I went on a bit of a spending spree buying soft goth clothes from companies with names like Vampire Freaks and Disturbia to plot out my fall identity. Next week I return to my exercise classes and volunteering efforts. I’m going to lean in heavy to activism now that the midterms are just weeks away. All hands on deck!!

Time management

Shockingly, I think I’ve somehow been able to manage my time a little too well, because just a few days shy of my event I’m bored and have nothing to do. And while I’m sure the next two days will involve all the chaotic people flying in with their last minute problems I have to solve, for the most part it’s pretty quiet. 

I left this weekend wide open so we could have some family time - go to the beach, or spend the day in the pool - but the H has to work all weekend, and I wasn’t up to tackling a beach trip all by myself, and our pool is broken, so of course we all just malingered around the house all day, me with a hot laptop on my lap answering the occasional email and desperately going over my to do list to see if I forgot anything. So it’s been a hot, boring weekend in which I’m both overstimulated with cyclical thoughts about all the things I need to remember and understimulated with lack of activity. And of course with triple digit temperatures I can’t get out and hike, either. What I should have done is headed over to the Y and hit the treadmill, but I didn’t think of that since I’ve only taken classes there for years. I need to remind myself that when it’s too hot to walk I really need to go there and get some exercise anyway. 

Speaking of overstimulated, so I made a frightening discovery when I went to the podiatrist to get my annual cortisone shot - according to my blood pressure readings, which they did multiple times and before and after the appointment, I am in stage 2 hypertension. They couldn’t get a reading under about 148/85 no matter what tricks we did, and the concerned nurse asked if I wanted to make an appointment about it. At first I thought it had to be just general event stress - after all, I do operate at a higher level of stress for the entire month of August - but either way it’s scary. I bought a home cuff monitor like I had in pregnancy, and unfortunately despite being home and comfortable the readings were the same. I had been ticking into the 130s over the last year or so according to my doctor visit reports - and nobody ever mentioned it to me, so I didn’t worry - but now it’s just too high. Of course I did a ton of research about it, and I bet I can name the culprit, since my diet is fine and I exercise regularly - it’s menopause. I would bet that when I do see the dr she’ll start me on estrogen and it will clear right up, in addition to fixing my horrible disrupted sleep. Part of me is hoping this condition plus being overweight will get me covered for a glp 1, but I’m not sure what my coverage is. I’m sure being 10 lbs overweight isn’t helping, either. 

For now I can’t do anything about anything except just get through these final days - tonight I have my last Knott’s (hurrah), tomorrow and Tuesday I have a number of last minute tasks plus packing and making sure the kids are set to spend the weekend in the hotel, and then we’re off. As of right now I’m shy of 900 people by about 15 which I’m sure I’ll get. Which means my prediction of losing another 100 people was accurate; but right now I’m just grateful that I didn’t lose more. I’m actually pretty pleased, truth be told.

Final week

You know when you get close to your weather app being able to predict the forecast during your event that your event is CLOSE. Here we are with just one (full) week left and one weekend before we pack up the truck on Wednesday and head out. 

I think this time for me is similar to those final weeks of pregnancy where thoughts of the birth are so constant and overwhelming that it’s truly exhausting being in your brain and you want nothing more than it being over so you can think about something else for a change. I can’t wait to start plotting out my fall garden, getting back to the desert, finalizing our Christmas break road trip, things like that. Right now I’m so inundated with event thoughts that I swear I can smell the hotel in my nostrils every day when I wake up. This of course leads to unwanted random shoots of adrenaline which then lead to diarrhea which then leads to inflamed hemorrhoids. Good times.

Last week on Monday morning I was made aware of an anonymous Reddit post accusing one of my volunteers of sexual assault (not at my event and not naming my event, but she - yes, she - works at a local dance studio). Unfortunately my safe spaces person who is tasked with investigating these things for both me and the studio has a personal beef against the person being accused, so it was a messy week of multiple messenger groups talking about this and not loving how she was handling it, and thereby constant interruptions. At the exact same time I became the subject of a bizarre series of harassing emails, which after ANOTHER investigation we determined to be from a guy I had banned. Could both be from the same person? Possibly, but we’ll probably never know for sure. We had to just drop the Reddit post investigation since all leads led nowhere, which also means nothing could be proven, which means I invited the accused person to stay on the volunteer staff, which several people were unhappy about and let me know how unhappy they were. This is my life now. All I can say is, something fucked up happens every year, and if this is it and we got it out of our system before the event even starts, then, great.

The boys got through their first full week of school - Bobby seems not thrilled with it all; he has retreated into himself a great deal and barely talks to us (normal?) but Theo is quite the chatterbox who loves to tell me every detail of everything that happened every day. I’m glad he chose horticulture as his elective - hopefully he can teach me some skills since I’m out here trying to learn from Facebook reels.

It is late August. Everything is dry as hell and it is relentlessly hot. Yesterday I got a $1000 bill for water & power - twice what it was this spring - no doubt from the double whammy of running the AC constantly and watering my surviving plants. But everything is also mostly fixed - my garage wall repair is completed and somehow paid for, I have my car back, the desert cameras are back after a reboot (they were inconsistently on or off for weeks), and our pool valves have been repaired (although we’ll need a new pump soon). 

This week I have a lot of appointments and meetings which is going to make it difficult to be home and do my work, which stresses me out a bit, but at least I can say with confidence that at this moment things are in order, and I have one more weekend without many plans to catch up just in case I need it. 

Here’s a pic of us from a big music festival yesterday. Unfortunately I got very sick from the shitty food and extreme heat and lay on the ground for most of it, but was able to rally for LCD Soundsystem who I was mostly there to see, and they were fantastic. 

First day of 7th and 9th grade

Today was the first day of school, and we got up far too early and then had to wait around until an appropriate time to leave. I of course hardly slept at all, fearing oversleeping and also dealing with the chaos of one of my instructors asking for a bunch of stuff at 10 pm that I will have to organize. 

But for the first time I got to watch the kids walk into their jr/sr high together, and that’s what they’ll be doing for the next four years. It’ll take a while to get the rhythm of when to leave/where to drop them and pick them up. I’m all discombobulated between being in a rental car that reeks of cheap cologne and this new daily routine.

The report was Bobby said his first day was “mid”, mostly railing about increasing restrictions on screen time at school and being generally unimpressed by everything that happened, while Theo seemed pretty thrilled. I’m hoping this means the best case scenario where he really steps up and starts to shine. At least he seems happy and excited about it, and that’s a good thing. I don’t know if this is a puberty vs pre-puberty thing; we’ll see what Theo’s like in two years.

Today I had a ton of complicated work and check-in phone calls with various staff for my event, all the things I had been delaying while the kids were still at home this week. Now I really have to buckle in and tie up all the loose ends I’ve been letting hang for months. 

Here are the boys on their first morning and then at the traditional post-first day ice cream stop:

About to start

All week I was in this weird, sad nostalgia mode about the kids’ final week of camp, realizing it might be the last time we ever go there, to the point of almost being in tears at moments. What’s up with that? First of all, they may both be back next year as CITs, and Theo could be a CIT for three years. But even if they have no interest in this camp again - why does this hit so hard for me?

I think that when your kids are this age, you really feel that clock ticking down, and it’s scary. It feels like everything is just a series of lasts. The other night in yoga I suddenly had this image of the photo of them sitting in the cowboy tub in the desert and realized they’d never be that little again and found myself tearing up.

When they’re little and every day is such a struggle, you long for these easy days of parenting big kids. And I promised myself I would never forget how hard those years were and start romanticizing them, and I will keep that promise. But still - my parenting days are more than half over - 3/4, really - and I’m sad about that. 

I had to explain to a friend without kids how sad every start and end of the school year is now - it used to be a happy time, but now it’s tinged with a little sadness. I told her these milestones just mean your kids are growing up. As much as I feel I might be getting a little over the top with this stuff, I also know I’m not alone - all of us parents constantly marvel at how big our kids have gotten and how we’re dreading high school graduations. Everyone has the same fears about affording college and hoping our kids can launch into their lives and not just be 30 smoking weed and playing video games in their childhood bedrooms. These are our concerns at this age.

Last night I picked the boys up from their summer camp Disneyland field trip at 9 pm and that was the end of that - I asked them to wash their camp shirts one last time and then I’d cut them up for rags (how symbolic). We have a fairly leisurely weekend, then Theo has school orientation on Monday and we start to kick into gear - Bobby needs new giant pants, I need to sort out Theo’s too-small clothes, find school supplies around the house, clean up their room a little (if not now, when?), and make sure Theo gets the final two thirds of his summer book report done before school starts. Then school on Wednesday, and I am officially back on school schedule. As much as I’m dreading getting up early, I’m also looking forward to getting back to my old exercise classes and having an extra hour in the day to hike before it gets hot, go to my freeway protest, etc etc. 

I feel like once they’re solidly back in school I can relax a little and stop feeling all this saudades - I’m a little worried about Theo’s transition to junior high, like any parent would be, so that’s giving some anxiety too. When I feel like he’s gotten the program and doing ok I can exhale a little. We won’t have a transition like this again until college. Hopefully it’ll be smooth sailing for a while.

Final week of “summer”

There’s that “end of summer” feeling in the air, which is very incongruous in Los Angeles - for us, summer weather continues for three more months. But yet, kids are back in school in just a week, so summer is, in fact, over. We’re currently experiencing The Big Bake - once the pacific marine layer at last burns off by mid-late July, now it’s just hot, hot, hot from sun up to sun down. High eighties to triple digits or at least mid-90s every day. Personally, I like the heat, except for it makes my necessary hikes impossible, and for me is a harbinger of my event coming up, with attendant anxiety. But I love the warm evenings and smell of the baked earth. Also getting to use the pool, and actually swim in the ocean, which we did yesterday. I do love summer even though my relationship with it is complicated.

I got through my anxious week of price increases and cut-offs ok - my numbers are still lagging, of course, but people are still signing up. I know better than to hope for some last minute miracle - with my high prices and the hotel sold out, there’s not going to be some last minute rush; there never is these days - but if people continue to trickle in even at half the rate of last year, I’ll have just enough to pay everyone. Then I live off of the weekend ticket sales, and the price increase on Feb 1, and I continue to kick the can of despair down the road until next spring and summer. And we may be living in a very different world by then, with the midterms over and the whole political landscape changed. But barring any emergencies, I’ll survive this year. It’s sad that I’m reduced from thriving to barely surviving, but here we are. 

Last week of camp, which involves me making lunches every day, a day off for a water park trip with friends, and a field trip to Disneyland on Friday for the boys. Then next week two days at home before school starts. They both have book reports due upon starting school, a fiction and non-fiction book each. Bobby is finishing up his second report; Theo is only halfway through his second book. I’m going to have to up his reading time from 45 minutes to an hour each night just to maybe get it done in time. I realized our current schedule, apart from being an hour later in the morning, is very similar to where we’ll be when they’re in school - 1/2 hour to get ready in the morning, drop off, pick up around four, make them start homework at 5. I keep feeling like there’s this huge change coming but not really. At least getting up earlier allows for me to get back to my old exercise classes. 

The only real change this year is Theo starting middle school and having to try harder. I feel like he really coasted these last two years and I’m worried he’s going to struggle to keep up. He’s a smart kid and I know he can do it, but he’s not used to working hard, as evidenced by how long it’s taking him to get through this book. I do have a fear that he’s not going to do well. Bobby seems to naturally apply himself so I never had to worry about him much - another way we’re similar. I’m going to have to pay close attention to Theo this year to make sure he’s not slacking. I feel like if he starts off well in 7th grade that’s a good sign that he’s got the skills to continue to do well. 

Penultimate camp week

It’s the boys’ second to last week of camp, and already I’m feeling a strange nostalgia for it. All of the kids at the camp are so little - they follow giant Bobby around like little ducklings - and my kids are so big. I don’t know if they’ll both want to try to be CITs there next year; it’s impossible to know what they’ll be like by next spring. I do think they enjoy having somewhere to go and getting to play with other kids, even little ones. But the day is coming when these sweet little no-frills summer camps are in the rear window, and I’m sad about that.

This also means school is coming up fast. I ordered Bobby a new backpack, Theo gets a haircut tomorrow, and I need to go through his pants to get rid of the ones that are too small that he insists on still wearing. Gone are the days of big expensive school supply lists, thank god, but I do still need to make sure I at least send them to school with some basics like pens and pencils and notebooks. Theo has an orientation two weeks from today and then they start Wednesday the 12th. I still have zero plan for how to pick them up, now that they get out together; I want them to walk somewhere away from the school so I’m not stuck in crazy school pickup traffic with nowhere to pull over, but I don’t know where that is yet. We’ll figure it out in those first weeks I’m sure. I also still want to explore them taking the bus home, but that can wait. 

This is an important and stressful week for my event. My price increase is Friday night, which means I should be getting a decent bump of people; also the refund cut off is the same day which means I’ll be getting lots of refund requests, too. I’ve already had three today and it’s not even noon. I’m simultaneously trying to re-sell canceled hotel rooms so I’m not on the hook to pay for them, and I have no idea how that’s going to go. 

Although it’s impossible to predict what’s going to happen in the next month, I do know that it’s too late to try to change what is going to happen. My numbers are dismal - I’m thinking I’m going to lose more than another 100 people, maybe even up to 200 this year, which puts me into “barely break even/lose a little money” territory, which is horrifying. It’s always possible it won’t be that dire, but if I do get a big bump of people at the end, that would be really surprising since that hasn’t happened in many years, not since before the pandemic. I’ll be ok this year only because I had a small surplus going into this year and a big tax return (although all of that will be taken up by this garage wall repair, which is currently inexplicably stalled), but by this time next year I’ll really be feeling it, especially if this trend continues. This is why I have to get a HELOC and use it for living expenses just to survive whatever this is, until or unless I can scale the event down to save money (which contractually I can’t do next year). 

The thought that always haunts me, though, is what if this whole idea is just played out? What if people are just not interested in what I have to offer, this particular brand? I can think of a million reasons why my attendance is plummeting, and I still think it’s almost entirely financial, but I also worry that it’s something else, something I can’t fix, which is that people just don’t care about this anymore and they’ve moved on, either to other newer events or away from dancing entirely. I went through a similar valley back in the early 2000s, when my numbers hovered around 550-600 for a couple of years and I was close to quitting and went into a massive depression over it. But then for no apparent reason my numbers started ticking up by 2005, 2006, and things started to look up. Will that happen again? Is this really all just Trump, and once he’s gone (or lame ducked) people will feel like spending money again? Who knows. I just know I’m in a pit right now and there’s nothing I can do to save myself and it’s really, really scary. 

Despite all this, though, I’ve mostly been able to maintain a positive attitude - I still have to put on the best damned show I can for those lovely people who are showing up, and I intend to do that, and just hope for a better future. My friends assure me that my brand is solid and this is just a blip we’re all experiencing - and they could be right, although they’re biased and just trying to cheer me up. Over the weekend I told myself to just try to be in denial - there’s nothing I can do to fix it, so why not just pretend I’m independently wealthy and running this for fun, so any dips in attendance don’t affect me personally but are just something to be observed? Sometimes this works. Denial can be powerful at times.