Only a week and a half to go. It's kind of a bit of a shock after almost a year of feeling like the Festival is ages away, and now it's right around the corner. 

Right now, it feels like everything's going wrong. I've spoken to a few friends who've done this sort of thing before, so I have it on good authority that there is a time like this and it's all ok. Last night I had a band drop out, which was a little disappointing but it's easy enough to slot one of the other bands into their place. Then this morning I called one of the residents who had previously agreed to host an artwork on his balcony just to check in with him, only to be told he'd changed his mind. Thank goodness I called! To top it all off, another resident came through and said that she didn't agree to hosting a theatrical piece, and the only company with access to one of the rooftops that we relied on access to flatly refused to grant access on a weekend, even though I offered sponsorship acknowledgement and distribution of marketing collateral. All in all, not a great morning. 

In a few of those cases I do acknowledge that it is my fault for not getting on to this earlier, but with some of the others it didn't matter about our earlier approaches when residents changed their mind. I guess this really is the time when things will go wrong because it's getting to crunch time, and if people are going to drop out or change their minds, now is the time they'll do it. On the bright side, this does mean that things are getting locked down and we're finding alternatives that will work now – concrete reality is replacing the blue sky dreaming. 

In some cases, the lack of permission is not such a bad thing. We might be ok with the roof access – it was to attach guy lines for a big inflatable, but the window on the next level down has bars that we might be able to attach to and the tenant is on our committee and a contributing artist. And the attachment site across the street also belongs to a committee member, who is actually being extremely generous and giving us her premises as a backstage and delivery area. So we'll be ok there. 

We had a great meeting yesterday about power, which has been one of my main concerns. Basically, our technological wizard is going to make it happen with the aid of a three-phase generator and epic cabling, which will suck up all our budget as well as a lot of fuel, but will at least let us have the festival we want. 

Then we have the WIP meeting today in less than an hour, and I'm hoping I can mainly be there to soothe and keep the Director's stress levels low. I'm fairly tense myself – I'm still working full-time, writing reviews for 2 shows this week and doing uni so I'm starting to struggle to find the time to get things done, but I think if I'm calm then she might be calm, and that will make life a whole lot easier for us all. 

Time to take a deep breath, because it's going to be a ten-day sprint to the finish.