A week out (nearly)

The event is officially over when all the boxes are put away in the shed, and that finally happened today. With the closing and locking of the shed door, it is now time to look forward.

I still have a few payments to make due to vendors lagging in sending invoices, but it’s a small and manageable amount, so I’m finally able to do some real calculations and determine that yes, in fact, I can pay off my house this month. I submitted a request for a payoff quote which should arrive in about a week, and then it’ll happen. Money will be tight after until I release contest registration in February - I may have to dip into my loan - but I will be mortgage-free, hopefully forever if I play my cards right. Unless there’s some ugly surprise like a pre-payment penalty or something like that, I should be able to do it. This is significant also in that it officially marks the end of my New Orleans debt from when I bought a four plex in 2005 that got wiped out by Katrina; most of what I’m paying now is not my original loan but the $250,000 in debt I piled on to this house from that mess. Hey, it only took nineteen years. 

In a shocking decision, the hotel agreed to pay all of my overages from their double booking error; I never would have expected that, and I am extremely grateful. Maybe they’re not so keen to get rid of me after all. 

I still have some loose ends to tie up next week but mostly I’m done. The project I want to focus on now is upgrading the boys’ room. It’s pretty embarrassing that I have an almost 13-year-old in a room that still has toddler-sized furniture in it; their room has always been a hot mess, with junk everywhere and scrapes on the walls and posters barely held up with scotch tape. It really needs a complete overhaul, with new paint and a desk and new beds. They say they want twin beds rather than a bunk bed, so we’ll figure out how to make that work; they also need a desk somewhere. Bobby has not asked about sleeping up in the attic, so hopefully that idea is on the back burner. I don’t know when or how we’re going to do all of this, but I plan to get it done before the end of the year. It’s weird to think this new bedroom setup could be their final one in this house, and that in as little as six years Bobby could be on his own. My how the time flies!

The After Times

It’s the day I always dream of - the day after my event, with a house full of boxes and laundry and an empty refrigerator. It’s over, and we survived, and everything went, and the customers are happy. 

To be honest I’m feeling meh about everything, and I don’t think it’s just the exhaustion talking. The event did have an abnormally high number of stressors this year - tons of flakiness with judges, teachers, and competitors, having to make way for celebrity visitors which stresses me out, the hotel once again dropping the ball on air conditioning, water, parking, and internet connections, a person freaking out because someone else was wearing a pro-Palestine t shirt, having to kick out two creepers who both threatened lawsuits (one already had a lawyer contact me), a friend using my event as leverage to call out another event and now that event is all angry, a teacher phoning in the morning of that they weren’t going to make it, my main teachers/competitors having a severe brain injury and barely making it through the weekend, an old friend’s girlfriend talking shit and having to confront them about it, etc etc etc. It’s all just so, so exhausting. 

Every organizer I’ve talked to lately has expressed a severe level of burnout, and I’m no different. My mind can’t help but wander to thinking about how great it would be to just not have to do this anymore - to just say fuck it and wander off into the desert and make macrame plant holders. This year I really felt my age - I didn’t dance at all, and for the first time ever didn’t come down and socialize late night Sunday. I had to buy an emergency pair of shoes because the heels I brought hurt my arthritic toe too much, and despite babying my voice all weekend it was still very difficult and extremely stressful trying to sing at half my usual capacity. For the first time I had to seriously ask myself…how much longer can I realistically do this? Will I really make it another twenty years? 

It’s fair to say there was little to no joy in it - it was just something I had to suffer through and survive. It’s always been this way, but somehow this year was especially mentally draining. Must one enjoy one’s occupation? Is that too much to ask? Perhaps. I do take pride in it, and it is meaningful to me, but boy is it all a royal pain in the ass. I feel like every year we just barely pull it off. 

The real question is the money, and I have no answers yet and probably won’t for at least another couple of weeks. So many of my payments to people are still pending, I don’t know what my actual costs are going to be, and I’m still waiting on the money Stripe is holding hostage for another week. Pre-sales for next year went well. But I made less money during the weekend by a few thousand dollars, and a lot less cash. I wish I knew right now if I’ll be able to pay off my house by October - that would be a huge boost to my spirits - but I just don’t know yet. Too many variables that could swing things too many thousands of dollars either way. 

A few days before the event I was driving home from the Y and was thinking about all the chaotic last minute customer service emails and work I still had to do, and I glanced over at a cemetery on the right side of the road and thought, “that looks so relaxing.” I laughed. But my brain had a good point. 

In other news, in my usual frenzy to fill the school break vacuum with something fun, on a whim I submitted an application for a permit to hike The Wave in Arizona, one of these rare bucket list items that apparently only 8% of lottery applicants get selected for. Well, guess what? We got a permit for Dec 30th. So it looks like an Arizona Christmas for us! Now I have to plan an inexpensive road trip around The Wave and figure out how that all works. Adventures await. 

Countdown

My kid pickup woes have been solved - I decided to have both kids head to the library after school, and it’s been a dream. Bobby seems ok with the .8 mile walk, maybe because so many other kids walk that direction after school; I’m sure it’s less awkward than standing around waiting for me. So I head out at 3:45 each day - way better than 2:15 - pull easily into the parking lot, and that’s it. I hope it continues to be this easy for the next two years. It’s amazing how stressed I was doing all that driving back and forth and didn’t even realize it. God bless our libraries, for real. 

Week two of school has concluded and I think Bobby’s doing ok - he seems to have mostly recovered from the shock of it all and is no longer actively complaining about the additional work. Luckily I can make it to his open house night, because it’s Wednesday, but not Theo’s because it’s the night before my event. It’s insane to me that I’m talking about my event in terms of it being just a week away - I even know the forecast (thankfully, mild). How is it going? Well, I announced the additional day for 2025 today amidst much fanfare, and everyone’s excited about it. I sincerely hope it does what I want and gets people pumped to show up next year - more than have been. The situation with the extra costs due to the short setup time continues; sure enough, the hotel wants my sound guy to parse out exactly which costs are associated with the actual spaces they were in breach of my contract on and not the others, which he refuses to do…ugh it’s all messy. I’m going to end up eating it, I think. I’ve stressed out so much about it I have no stress left to give it. 

I’m so full of decision fatigue that all I can do is give my brain breaks by thinking about other things - planning the holidays, for example. We currently have zero plans for any school breaks going forward except a vague one to go to Yellowstone next summer; Thanksgiving and Christmas are empty. My sister was supposed to visit but gave up because it’s all just too expensive. So once again my thoughts drift to the almost 200,000 Marriott points and over 200,000 miles I have on United. Part of me would like to pull off another Big Island trip so we can take the boys on the late night manta ray tour - they’re well old enough now, and it’s pretty spectacular (and only exists in two places on the planet). The miles aren’t quite enough to get us there and back…but could get us there, with a $500-$600 cost per person to return on another airline. We could also go to Mexico, but for how violently ill I’ve gotten the last couple of times I’ve been there, I’m not too keen, honestly. We could just do nothing, or go to the cabin briefly, but I’d rather spend Thanksgiving out there. Another part of me wants to do something really spectacular and go to Iceland or something…but I don’t know what fantasy world I live in that I could afford that, especially this year. 

Yesterday we had a freak emergency when I discovered our refrigerator had quit; of course you never notice these things until all your ice cream is slush and the milk is bad. Despite how badly this went last time, this time, so far, we got it repaired quickly and cheaply and only lost a few frozen items. I now have a fridge and freezer thermometer so it won’t get so out of hand again; and there will be a next time, believe me. This refurbished fridge has already outlasted its proposed lifespan at six years - I don’t expect it to last much longer. But just please, past my event. 

Here are the boys watching the DNC with me. 

First week

The first week of school has completed, and we’re all breathing a sigh of relief. The jr high pickup situation continues to be a disaster - there’s just TOO MANY KIDS. Also, I thought I could handle two pickups until my event is over, but I can’t. It’s two full hours of my life - from 2 pm until 4 pm - of driving back and forth every day. Theo asked when he was going to start doing “the library thing” and I figured Monday was as good a time as any. So on that day I’ll pick him up and walk him over to the library - we drove by today just so he knows what it looks like - and take him in and get a sense of what it’s like, how many kids are there, how chaotic it is or isn’t, etc. His 5th grade teacher is putting a big emphasis on reading, and I’m hoping this will be the year reading kicks in for him. She has him reading 30 min every night, and also reading during class. He told me he randomly picked The Diary of Anne Frank, which blew my mind. I read it in I think 6th grade, and it prompted a lifelong love of journal keeping (now this blog), not to mention a lifelong study of the horrors of the Holocaust in general. I told him all the facts I knew about her story - that you can still visit their hiding place in Amsterdam; that when the play premiered on Broadway and the final curtain went down the audience was completely silent; that Anne died just weeks before the camps were liberated. I hope he gets something out of that book - it loomed huge in my young life.

So hopefully starting Tuesday I can just do one pickup - SOMEHOW find a better spot to pick up Bobby - and then head to the library to get Theo who will have been there about an hour. It also occurred to me that on the final day of my event, when the kids are in school but we’re at the hotel packing up - although last year we did manage to make it home in time to pick up the kids (I had a friend pick them up just in case), we still need a plan in case we get stuck there. So I’ll have both Theo and Bobby walk to the library. I’ll have to print a map or something for Bobby, also show him where it is. Then I won’t have to worry that they’ll be standing around on the street while we’re stuck in traffic or something.

It’s hard to say how school is going for Bobby - he’s still stubbornly refusing to use his planner, which apparently is common among 7th grade boys - and during the week he definitely expressed a lot of dismay about the work and how complicated everything is now. I’m low-key worried about him, and wishing he hadn’t selected quite so many honors classes. But I also don’t have much mental space to really think about this at the moment, and it’s too early to tell how he’s actually doing. I’ve got a lot on my plate, to say the least.

After a lot of back and forth, I’ve decided to go ahead and add that additional day next year. I wrote out a detailed budget and a conservative estimate of how much of that extra expense I think could be covered, and it all seemed very doable. So I sat down and put together the whole updated schedule, contacted the friends who run the Thursday night venue I’ll be conflicting with, told more peripheral staff members, and the announcement will launch next week. I’m committing to it, now, and it’s a bit scary. But it’s also necessary, I think - other than moving to Labor Day in 2013, I’ve been doing everything exactly the same for many years. It’s time to shake things up and breathe new life into the thing as we head into our next quarter century.

First day of school

Today was the first day of 7th grade for Bobby and 5th grade for Theo. It was the first time dropping Theo alone at the safety valet, and then finding my way over to the giant jr/sr high school for Bobby (who unfortunately will probably always be a half hour early). I wasn’t sure where to drop him off, so I just pulled over on a not busy part of the main drag where he could see the entrance and watched him get out. He gave me a genuine look of, “well, here I go!”as he got out, and I said, “it’s going to be ok, honey!”, and then I watched him walk down the street and into the school entrance all by himself. And that was that.

Upon pickup, Theo was full of stories of his first day; lots of talk about the large earthquake that struck while I was in the shower (biggest one I’ve felt since Northridge - it was right under us) - the kids were evacuated briefly. Never a dull moment. I thought we could pull over and wait for Bobby, but it was still so early that I decided to come home and use the bathroom and wash hands and drop our stuff and then turn back around to pick up Bobby and go to First Day of School Ice Cream. 

There was quite a traffic jam to pick up the high school kids; almost all of them appeared to be headed to Eagle Rock Blvd on their own. I wonder if there’s a bus line that would get B home…? Anyway, thanks to modern technology we were able to find each other. He said his first day was “interesting”. He seemed happy, though, as his fears of not being able to find his classes abated. He also reconnected with a lot of friends from his old school that he hadn’t seen all last year, which was nice. I was glad he had people to sit with at lunch (always a mine field for kids this age). 

So for both kids there was no work today, but I imagine at least for Bobby all that will kick in fast. I don’t know how that’s going to go. I’m still worried about all these Honors classes he’s in. I guess only time will tell.

Today I busied myself with the fussier projects for my event, and had to shut down comments on my public apology post because people were getting too ugly. I have not heard from the friend I offended, and I may never. Sigh.

I am back on my workout schedule and am quite happy about that. Tomorrow bright and early I’m back to my Pilates class I haven’t been able to take for two months, same for Friday’s strength training class. Tonight I did yoga. I’m pretty convinced having a regular yoga practice has helped keep me sane during these rough waters for the last week. Still a lot to do. In a little over two weeks we pack up and go. Too fast. On the way back from yoga I was fantasizing about paying off my house, moving out, renting it, moving out to the desert, and never doing my event again. If my kids weren’t school aged that plan would sound awfully appealing right now.

Here’s the boys, before and after.

The night before

The boys start school tomorrow, and I’m bummed that I won’t be here tonight to have a nice family dinner or get them to bed. I’m at Knott’s, of course. Three more Sundays there and we’re done for the season.

So in a couple of hours I’ll have them get their backpacks together - Theo has finally graduated from the character backpacks and ordered a plain black one - putting in whatever supplies I *think* they’ll need, since there’s no real guidance on this this year - and then give Bobby his “starting 7th grade” present which is a Vidiots hoodie. Then tomorrow it all begins. Early wakeups, figuring out breakfast, driving to two different schools for the first time since 2019. I can’t really wrap my head around the fact that summer is over, as far as the kids are concerned, and we’re back in “school mode”. It’s less stressful than last year’s switch to a new school, but still full of new routines. I’ll definitely be curious what Bobby has to say at the end of the day. Most likely it will be a shrug and “it was fine”, ha ha.

More shit piled on me at the end of the week - one, a person I’d been putting off formally banning had to be banned because he won a free pass to my event in a contest and was trying to redeem it, so we had to send him an email and then I hid from my email for two days, fearing the repercussions; and I posted my themes for my event, usually a fun and joyful moment, and in the middle of the night got a message from a much beloved customer that they found the theme deeply offensive, and several other people on IG chimed in as well, causing me to have to pull the whole campaign (very complex for someone like me who doesn’t fully understand how all these stories, reels, and posts work) and issue a formal public apology, which is something I’ve never had to do in my 26 years in this business. It was a mess, and there’s a right wing (these offended people are just snowflakes!) vs left wing (you have to be sensitive to people’s feelings about things!) argument on my business FB page that’s been raging since Friday and getting uglier and uglier. I’ve gotten a lot of praise for my apology, which, as much as it’s kind of people to do so, turns my stomach a little because I didn’t apologize to look like a good person, I apologized because it was the right thing to do. The issue of offense was something I never in a million years could have predicted - many people private messaged me, “I still don’t get why people are offended by this” - so it is a bit of a stretch. However, it doesn’t matter if I think it’s a stretch. I’m upset that I didn’t see this - nobody did - and as I sat unraveling all of this and feeling like a jerk, I told myself, “you know, as much as you try not to, sometimes you’re just going to be That Clueless White Lady”. It sucks, but it’s true. My customer has read, and not responded to, my personal apology to her. She may never, and I’m just going to have to live with that, the possibility that she’ll just never forgive me. 

Saturday morning a fellow organizer called to ask my opinion on a situation they are dealing with, in which a competitor wore what could be perceived as an anti-Israel shirt in one of their contests and they were trying to figure out whether to hide the video or post it. It dawned on me that I may have to deal with this issue at my event, too, so my staff and I came up with a plan that hopefully we can all stand by and live with. Isn’t dance camp organizing fun??

Last week was the absolute worst. But I think I managed to get through it without completely spiraling. It’s very helpful when your baseline of happiness is already pretty high - it wasn’t too hard to get back to that, once the dust settled. I feel beat up but I’m just continuing to move forward, as I must. I have just two and a half weeks to get every single thing done. Pray for me. 

Here’s a picture from a fancy dress up belated birthday dinner I had Friday night.

Orientation

Today was Bobby’s new school orientation. I dropped Theo at camp and we went alone (the H joined until he had to leave for work). It wasn’t mostly useful except to tell us where he has to go Monday morning (the auditorium), how to get a Chromebook (I requested one online while there and was able to get one minutes later - phew), and the opportunity to buy PE uniforms (cash only so we had to leave to find an atm and come back). I saw several familiar parents there - including a guy who plays sax in our orchestra - but B didn’t want to stay for the tour so we missed out on that chance to socialize. I hope I don’t go through this entire school not making any parent friends, either, but I just might. 

On our way in (of course I was the first to arrive - hello, anxiety disorder!) I mused to Bobby how we would look back on this day, how this school will most likely be in our lives until 2032, and how different everything will be, then. 

At least now I know what to prepare for Monday - other than his Chromebook, Bobby doesn’t really need any supplies; I printed out his list of classes and teachers that became available a couple of days ago (he got Spanish and illustration as he wanted) so he has that information - I got him a haircut, and we went to In N Out for lunch. I asked him if he was nervous, and he said yes, he was nervous about not being able to find where his classes are and that he won’t be able to move from class to class in time each day. I can see how moving from one class to another for the first time could be daunting. But I assured him it’s a 100 year old school and it’s set up for him to succeed - they’re not going to make things intentionally difficult or impossible, and that every 7th grader will be in the same boat. I gave him my one piece of advice based on my experience in high school, that once I got involved in the school - joined some clubs, started volunteering for things - I had a much better time and made friends. He’s very much like me in that he’ll hermit himself if nobody draws him out. So hopefully he heeds that.

Tomorrow I have set aside for Theo’s school stuff - I’ll go pick up some supplies (apparently not mandatory at his school - just wish list stuff, so I’ll have to use my judgement as far as what to send him with Monday), and also swing by his school to check if the teacher he’s assigned is actually the gifted cluster teacher, since she’s not the one his teacher last year told me he should get. They screwed this up last year so I want to make sure he’s not put in the wrong class again.

Things were going smoothly with the event - numbers are good; only about 10-15 people off from last year, after all my stressing about it - until yesterday, when the hotel called to say they’d accidentally double booked another event on top of our setup time on Thursday and Friday, meaning half of my space isn’t available for setup until just hours before we need it, and we’ve got two days worth of dance floor and a/v equipment to install. It’s a nightmare. My a/v guy is coming up with a plan on how to try to make it all work - but it’ll cost, and now I’ll have to fight with the hotel over paying that. And it’s just going to stress us all out - I’m going to have to move a bunch of people booked for rehearsals, and we’ll arrive Thursday night with possibly nowhere to put all our stuff. Just, ugh. It’s always something. Let’s just hope this is the worst “something”. Right now, too, is when all the last minute special requests come in - an elderly lady wanting me to raise money to get her a hotel room and also rides to and from the hotel; teachers wanting me to rearrange the teaching schedule so they have more rest time to be in all the contests I really needed them to judge instead; customers asking if the hotel will offer gluten free food options for lunch, a customer who’s husband sadly died a few months ago wanting me to find a worthy person to donate his pass to, etc etc etc. This is 100% my job right now and 100% the reason I have the free time and flexibility I have in my life, so I’m not complaining. But I reserve the right to complain just a little.