Thursday, September 4, 2008

Prairie Song

It's starting, for real.

This weekend is our annual Prairie Celebration at work. 2 days of reinactors camping out and displaying their skills as blacksmiths, basket weavers, metal workers, bead makers, collectors, educators, corn husk doll makers, and musicians. It's a pretty cool scene. There is food, kids' games, a reptile show (which I used to do), a raptor show, and a vintage baseball game on Sunday afternoon, tours of our 1860s homestead, and wagon rides. And everything (but the food) is free! I don't know why more people don't take advantage of this event. We get hundreds throughout the weekend, but free entertainment? There should be more.

What is weekend also entails is a ton of planning. I had to schedule as many volunteers as possible to work in all different jobs at different times and make sure this person wasn't paired up with this person and this person was inside and this one was able to be sitting all day or this one got to only come for 1 hour of a 4 hour shift and then I had to work in the college kids who always help out for service hours and finally I had to fill the open spots with staff members and then place myself into the remaining holes in the schedule, all the while making sure nothing conflicts with anything else. And that's not even the real hard work that other staff members get to do.

This weekend will also entail a ton of running around, answering public questions, directing traffic, dealing with volunteers' complaints about "how things used to be and aren't anymore", the aforementioned filling in of vacant spots, restocking coolers for the reinactors, and helping to oversee the general schedule of events. I'm gonna try to get some sort of food for myself in there at some point, but a traditional lunch hour? Forget it.

It's an exhausting time, but it's a good event. It does mean working 9 days in a row, but then hopefully I'll get to take the last couple days of next week off to compensate. No overtime for weekend work for me, but I'll take a day off later.

If you're in the neighborhood, you should come by and take a wagon ride!

erin

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

this is such a great thing to go to....always well run and interesting....so much to do and being free makes it nice...good weather this weekend....I'll be going.