setup

Setup day.
It's the worst day of the festival. It's when the complaints come in, when things fail to arrive as ordered, and when you work a fourteen hour day of lifting heavy objects and having to smile at the same time.
My day started at 7 am, when I walked down to Officer's Square to wait for the tent people, and didn't end until half an hour ago - over fourteen hours. Really, though, the pain that was today started some time ago and turned into a very long, jittery night last night, with very little sleep and lots of strange dreams. I was already sick with worry (literally) before they delivered the wrong size tent and no tables or chairs as ordered. I had to take a time out in the morning to take some Gravol and lay down before the craftspeople started arriving.
All told, though, even with more actual problems than last year, we have gotten so much better at this routine it was practically seamless. We had three helpers instead of five this year, and even so we had a lot of between-task time instead of madly dashing from crisis to crisis. We had everything staked and number by noon, and our new tents took no time at all, so we were able to do things like help Veit carry everything in. He's a blacksmith, and currently is five weeks into healing a broken collar bone, so we were doing as much of the heavy lifting as we could for him.
Festivals quickly bring the best and the worst out of people. John is in a good mood this weekend, and he joined Shasta and I in our usual late-setup-evening pizza party (dude has a weakness for garlic fingers). Resentment flies at the people who bail on the hard jobs and stressed vendors get worked up about every hole, bit of shade, or other minutiae of their 150 square feet of turf. When the intense flash thunderstorm rolled through with biblical magnitudes of rain and big cracking booms of thunder, people were so tense they just kept on unpacking and fretting, though standing in a soaking wet metal structure in the middle of a field.
People are weird.
My feet hurt.
Parallax is stalking a blueberry on the floor.
It's only the first day.