DaveWells.us

Vin­cent in the Boom Truck

I’m in Seat­tle once again, work­ing at the North­west Folk­life Fes­ti­val, which hap­pens over Memo­r­ial Day Week­end. I’ve writ­ten about the fes­ti­val before. I arrived Sat­ur­day evening, fol­low­ing a bus trip from Madi­son to Chicago and a flight to Seat­tle. I think that if I do this again next year, I’m going to seri­ously look into tak­ing Amtrak the whole way. I love trav­el­ing by train, and I’ve never seen most of that part of the coun­try, except from above. The trip would prob­a­bly take a cou­ple of days, although I think it would be a nice relax­ing way to get across the coun­try. But, I digress.
This is my fifth year work­ing as the Sig­nage Coor­di­na­tor for the fes­ti­val. So, I pretty much know every­thing that needs to be done and have a pretty good idea of how to do it. Thus far, it’s been pretty easy­go­ing, and I think I’m even a lit­tle ahead of sched­ule. The pro­duc­tion team (who I’m tech­ni­cally a part of, even though I func­tion on my own most of the time) seems to be really knock­ing out their work, too. Tomor­row will be the start of the big push, as the fes­ti­val opens on Fri­day morn­ing. I also get the first of my two assis­tants tomor­row, which will be quite nice.
So far, I’ve been mostly sort­ing out my stuff and work­ing with Vin­cent, one of the Seat­tle Cen­ter’s boom truck oper­a­tors. The lat­ter task involves alot of stand­ing around and occa­sion­ally say­ing “to the right a bit,” “up a lit­tle more,” “try tying it to the other branch,” etc. It’s amaz­ing how tired you can get just stand­ing around out­side all day. Vincent’s a great guy though, so I don’t mind it too much. Tomor­row, I’ll start car­ry­ing signs and lad­ders around and climb­ing on things. Thurs­day will be a mad dash to fin­ish putting every­thing up, with a lit­tle more time on Fri­day before the fes­ti­val opens. Once the fes­ti­val itself gets going, I usu­ally have a fair amount of free time to wan­der around, lis­ten to music, peo­ple watch, and take pic­tures. I brought both my lit­tle dig­i­tal cam­era and my ‘real’ film cam­era with me. So, I hope to have some decent pics that I can post right away, along with some more inter­est­ing ones to post after developing/scanning/etc.
Well, it’s time for me to shower and crash, so I can be up and at ‘em early tomor­row morning.