I don’t in any way want to sound like I’m complaining, because it’s been a lot of fun, too, but it’s been a very busy ten weeks for me, what with my job as a technical editor which continues to be both very satisfying but also very challenging and sometimes tiring, and with a lot of weekend events, many requiring a lot of planning for — two Billy Club gatherings (including May Day, for which I was in charge of organizing the construction of the maypole and the rituals around it), two Body Electric workshops (which were both extraordinarily full weekends but also terrific), and Pride Weekend, which was not only a long busy weekend but for which I started making plans a couple of weeks in advance.

Each year, for the Saturday and Sunday that encompass the Pride Parade and the two-day mega street fair that is increasingly a bigger deal than the Parade itself, I am sort of an office manager for a hundred or so volunteer safety monitors. I and a several others work together to get them checked in and out as quickly as possible, provide coffee and a simple breakfast buffet (bagels and cream cheese, muffins, fruit), give them a place to stash their sweatshirts and backpacks while they’re working, and get them their identifying T-shirts and their handbooks and radios and bottles of water and bags of trail mix and whatever else they need to have with them on the route.

Fortunately I am a great one for taking notes, and last year went very smoothly, so I was able to read through my notes and simply plan to do 95% of it the same way we did it last year. For the most part, this year went even more smoothly — at least from my administrative point of view. Outside where the party was going on, there were an unusually high number of incidents requiring attending to, from a bloody fight between a couple of homeless men to a marcher who was assaulted while separated from the rest of her contingent because she was having an asthma attack to the usual dozen or so problems involving marchers with motor vehicles who affect not to have heard about the basic safety rules they agreed to follow when they signed up to march.

Of course I took notes again this year on what worked well and what didn’t, so I’ll have them to look back on next year. I still have the final report to finish up, but other than that, I’m done with the Parade for another year.

So this past weekend was the first relatively lazy weekend I’ve had in a while. It wasn’t even as lazy as all that, as Saturday afternoon was a meeting of some members of the Billy Club who are hammering out a proposal for a fresh mission statement and values statement. But Sunday I slept in, played some Civ IV, went to lunch with Dave and Terry, and walked back home from the café, stopping at Central Perk for a couple of hours to read and write. (I’ve been reading Walter Karp’s The Politics of War, about the politics leading up to the Spanish-American War and our entry into World War One.) Then off to do a small load of laundry, dinner with Dave, and bed.