thursday: family fun day

on wednesday i started hanging out with a good friend of mine named
ande. he was really excited about the event and basically told me he
would be my partner in crime for the whole four days. this really
saved me because i was really running the show without anyone else
(aside from amazing and supportive lead goldman who unfortunately
had to miss a lot of the action because of work) for most of the days,
and during the tough moments i don't think i could have self-motivated
out of the fray. ande was nice because he was always encouraging and
reminded me how cool this whole ballyhoo thing really was.

on thursday leah (another gal who was really awesome and a great
mentor. she helped with a lot of the preparation, but wasn't able to
make it to many of the days beyond thursday.) and i spent the whole
morning preparing for our first day. it was kind of scary. i had no
idea what to expect. things started going wrong. the trailer hitch
was catching the spokes on my road bike and bending them (a lot). we
took too long to fix it and i started stressing out. but, it worked
out, we made it to the park with about 4 loads of stuff. i needed to
relax, so i got to work on, in my humble opinion, one of the most fun
creations of the day--a box fort made of TOTALLY GIANT BOXES. we had a
ton of them and the fort was more like a castle. i wish i had taken pictures,
it was glorious! a traveling man from olympia, who played a lot of music,
and sounds like he also did a lot of acid...helped me with the fort for
hours. we were taping and cutting and postulating all day in the sun,
which was beating down all afternoon. in the end the fort was thursday's crowning
glory. little kids were WILD about it, and later it was the perfect place
to chill out and partake in safety meetings afterwards.

we did WAY TOO MUCH the first day. we had a watermelon bull's eye
contest. where you spit seeds at something resembling a dart board
laid in the grass. we made ice cream in ziplock bags...most of which
were carted off by children and never seen again. we had a HUGE
PARACHUTE that the kids adored. (ps. thursday's 'theme' was family
fun day, so most of the activities were geared towards kids). there
were hula hoops around and some man set up a crazy bean bag toss game
that he had engineered himself. we were also bbqing the whole time
and trying to give away free food, which was a lot harder than i
thought it would be. no one believed us! all our fun was happening
amidst a monthly street fair and i think that was why people were
hesitant to accept the free food, they thought i was trying to dupe
them maybe? who knows, people are strange. sometimes people think
free things are going to be crappy because no one would ever give away
something great or worth while. i hate that. we also had a
megaphone, which was super amusing. i could yell anything! they had
to listen! a lot of the booths around us giggled a lot at the
festivities and it was a fairly successful day. i was wiped out by
the end of it. i could barely see straight. the last thing planned
was a parade to movies and that totally didn't happen. a real
disappointment. while riding there to let them no it was a 'no go' i
actually fell off one pedal and scraped up my foot pretty
bad. at that point i knew i had to slow down and relax a bit. once i
ate some food i felt a lot better.

okay, onto friday!!!