Hello Friends!

Hello Friends - it has been too long! We need to be better about writing to each other - post anything - what you're doing at work that day - I don't care - it's always fun to hear from you all.

I'm still in Washington DC, at the National Council for the Traditional Arts. My job is to assist with the production and logistics of 4 folk and traditional music festivals this season. What this actually means is that I book a LOT of airplane tickets to get stage technicians and sound engineers into our destination cities, and coordinate all of the tech info they need, like stage plots, equipment needs, and schedules, to give them once they're on site. So far, we've done festivals in Butte, Montana; Lowell, Massachusetts; and Bangor, Maine. Our last one will be in Richmond, Virginia, at the beginning of October. We travel out for about a week, but the festivals are just Fri-Sun. I always say that festivals are like summercamp for adults - you make a whole bunch of best friends in a condensed time period. They're good people - the staff is a lot of fun to work with. The office work in the weeks in between gets a bit repetitive, as you go through the same procedure to prepare the artists and staff for each festival, so I tend to live for the weeks of travel. On the academic front, I owe Susan so many update reports, it's embarrassing (soon, I promise!).

Jessica, I looked at that article, and it says Liska is traveling to do the installation the 18-22 - she must be there now! She asked me a few weeks ago to do the museum brochure for Morton Bradley, so I got to learn a little about him. It's still in review for edits among the big folks, though, we haven't reached a final draft. But it's looking good. Liska's colorful words of excitement when I sent it to her really brightened my day :)

On that note, I'm doing more graphic design work all the time, which I really enjoy. IU providing all the new Adobe CS4 software for download to students was a big help to me! My last big project was making light-pole banners, now hanging in 18 locations around the University of Michigan campus (my undergrad). There's a picture on my blog, if you want to see it. (The rest of the blog is lagging a bit - I find the interesting things to write about might be too revealing for the business of wherever I work at the time, and I always feel I owe some loyalty to the organization that employs me, so that's that.) But if you've got graphics projects, send them my way!

My NCTA gig ends in October - so after that I need a new job! So I'm on the hunt yet again....

Hope you're all doing well, and hope to read updates or hear from you all soon, too!

(And if you're in the DC area in the next couple months, let me know!)

all my best wishes,
Sarah