Next weekend will be the first festival that is run by my grove.  Weirdly enough, the things u worried about when planning in August were no problem, the things I thought would go smooth didn't.  My worries at the start were the obvious ones.... Would we get people?  Would we get enough workshops?  Would we meet our obligation to the hotel?  Well, we got 22 different people showing up, some I have never met before.  We also met our obligation in food and rooms to the hotel.  Workshops also were not a problem as we have 2, possibly 3 that were shelved.

The hotel though was my point of stress.  After we signed our contract, out was radio silence.  There was staff turnover.  There was difficulty in getting details in writing.  I understand now that some of this is normal, but it was unsettling to go through the first time.  We finally got the final contract and made payment yesterday.  

We also made some bad assumptions, mostly on the cost of the food... We knew we were going to take a loss, and we could afford it so it wasn't a big worry.  Our estimated on food though were about 2/3 of the final food costs mostly because we didn't think about gratuities.  The Grove can still afford the bigger loss, so not a huge deal.  We will learn from this and adjust next year after we get all of final numbers from this festival in.

Thursday next week will likely be the last rough day, and hopefully the prep work we have put in will lead to a good festival, and will mostly run itself.  I'm sure something will happen though, and we will have to deal with it, but it will hopefully be something minor.

Of course there was/is one more point of stress and that is my potential elevation to senior priest.  I had a few courses to complete essentially by 1 month before festival.  For one course though, the initial review pushed well beyond the 2 weeks they are supposed to take.  This pushed my whole tunneling almost over.  I did my request exactly 1 month to the day before when I wanted to be elevated.... The stress of waiting to hear about that is getting higher by the day only because there is a week left to make final plans.... Original timings would have had this all done and over by the 2nd or 3rd week of February.