Just got a call from Dave Exxxxxxx last night...seems the Ontario Renaissance Festival is going the way of the last of the Mohicans! My head is reeling! We went through about 8 stages in about 10 minutes...shock, anger, denial and so forth. Considering that the ORF makes me, what...75 percent of my income...thats a serious hit. Dammmit! I thought things were going a little too smooth to be true! So now, at the age of 48, I start all over again at the bottom!
Well, maybe not quite at the bottom...I still have the shop, and I still have a backlog. I have my health, and a family....and even without the Ren Faire, I still have the coolest job in the world. Guess now I will have to work on this expansion thing. Push the 25% up somewhat.
Was up most of the night trying to make plans with insufficient information. Perhaps somebody else will buy the show, perhaps other investors will jump in. Perhaps I will have to take down the buildings and erect them at some other show...in which case I better get entry into some other show! Wonder if Maryland has an opening.... This show was not showing any signs of being bad...in fact, I had the best year ever, and the people I talked to at the front office told me that they had the highest attendance ever, so go figure. Not looking forward to dismanling that post and beam building....though I built it so I can take it down!
On a lighter note! Shayne fixed my computer! I know...doesn't sound like much, however those who are in this business might be interested in the obscure chain of events which resulted in the poor old Aptiva not getting past its setup boot. It would boot up into safe mode just fine. None of the backups would change anything. Turns out that I had suceeded in clearing out Comet Cursor (yet one more time) and the mouse was looking for it on boot up! Shayne did it in DOS, but apparently I could have done it in Windows...went through all the settings and looked for things which were different in anything between safe and normal boot up. The cursor was set for some "dilbert" cutsey cursor for some reason. It set itself there after a bad shutdown. Go figure!
The patches are in! Now my club can put patches on all their gear...gambesons, shields, whatever! Nice looking things.
Well, its ten o'clock...start time around here. Guess I better make some stuff, get started on that "expansion".
2 comments:
Oh wow. I can't believe that the ORF is going away. I have fond memories of it. Was this past summer the last year?
If you could get into MD I think it would be great for you. I bet you would make five times as much money.
Still, Wow. What a surprise.
Making money is nice...its like poker chips that tell you that you are doing well, but without the Ren Faire, I would never have met you or Pat, never met Dave, never got comps to the Stratford Festival, never be on this Blog. I would have built a business, but it would look radically different than the one I am in now! I never would have met Adam or Jules Smith, Jules Seniour (a man I greatly respect because I look and see, and I saw respect for vendors, staff, and my country)I met actors like Tom, Neil (the mud man!), TV actors such as Adrian Paul who dropped in as customers, and I got to spend my summers crawling over Chinatown in Toronto,biking on the Niagara escarpment, made wine, rode the Maid of the Mist... and through Pat, visited Civil War battle sites, Harper's Ferry, and the great museums in Washington.
An awful lot of what I am is tied up in what this festival made me. The festival closing is a real kick, and of course, I would love to do what I can to keep it open for all of the above personal reasons. I would spend my fortune to keep it open (if I had one!) just for the "life style".
Drop into my web site, and read my diary on how I built my Post and Beam building. WWW.southtower.on.ca Go to the "library" and then to "Yusef's Post and Beam experience".
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