save your sanity for later.

The cats REALLY wanted to go outside today, so I eventually capitulated and figured I should just plan on supervising them until I can figure out George's most recent means of escape.

He didn't actually make any full escape attempts, but he did try and pretend to be a bird in the stump of a Burning Bush. My current hypothesis is that he has managed to climb the netting to escape through a gap right above the Burning Bush.



The neighbors got rapt attention for a while, I think because one of them had a (very well-behaved!) dog.



While supervising the cats, I also managed to get the raspberries pruned. The bright pink tips of the useless rhubarb are also starting to show!



This rhubarb is useless because it refuses to make big, juicy stalks. Instead every year it just tries to make flowers and seeds, as if reproducing sexually is its top priority for some reason. Super annoying.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll manage some compost and worm bin sorting. I'd like to get composts applied to the soil before the perennials all come fully back to life.

The past week and weekend were hectic, so to my relief, this weekend is a quieter one.

I also finally got relief from the bureaucratic purgatory I've been in for the past 6 weeks-plus, so I can finally talk more about it all. The bureaucratic purgatory has been just one part of what made the past week hectic. Basically, I'm still the point person for the rowing club's special events, which involves applying to our municipality for Special Events Permits. This year, the city threw in an added complication, in that technically our event is happening in space owned and managed by the State, so for the first time in the 8 years I've been doing all this, the City said we also needed to obtain a permit from the state.

Cue lots of internal screaming. The last time I tried to obtain a permit for something from the State, it was for a liquor license for our regatta, and while that all eventually more-or-less worked out, it took forever, was an extremely opaque process, and wound up costing us over a grand in surprise fees. After that all wrapped up we all concluded we would never, ever bother to try and have alcohol at one of our events, ever again. Just not worth it in any way, shape, or form.

Anyway, in this case, thankfully the permit point person for the State was pretty responsive (at least, once I called in instead of just emailing), and that is how I was able to learn fairly quickly that the info I had about a paper permit application form was out-of-date, and I should submit the application through a newer electronic system. Okay. At least that meant I wouldn't be blindly assembling a bunch of paperwork to mail in and then wonder whether it ever arrived successfully, let alone whether it was actually filled out correctly, etc.

Of course, it was only later on, partway through the whole application process, that I then learned that yes, we also had to submit a whole bunch of additional insurance information as compared to what we've had to submit in the past to the City, including some forms that don't make much sense for the nature of the activities we have planned, that have more to do with construction insurance than with people running and walking on a bike-hike trail. So we then had a terrible time hunting down the appropriate insurance forms, which have all sorts of obtuse acronym names and numbers, and where certain information must be EXACTLY the same in every place and must appear in EXACTLY the right place on the form. After a ton of casting about by a bunch of us, I eventually wound up tracking down a person involved in organizing a larger regional running event to ask how they handled things, and then finally learned from them that we'd picked the wrong one out of two main options for providing our event insurance. Ugh. Sigh. Still - that person saved us.

Yes, it wound up costing us extra money to go back and submit a sanctioning application to the other insurance-providing entity, but the people who provided the correct insurance were amazing and expedited our application on their end, so it was only 4 days or so of waiting instead of 2 more weeks of waiting. I then immediately turned back around and finally furnished the updated, correct documentation to the State. That was towards the end of the week before last. Then, another agonizing wait of several more days, as the clock ticked down closer and closer to our event date. To my great relief, we FINALLY got the State approval this past Tuesday, so then I turned right back around and sent along all of that documentation over to the City. Last but not least, I was then finally able to call in and submit the final payment to the City this past Friday. For an event scheduled to happen a week from today.

No sweat, right? Ugh. It is so, so bad to cut this kind of thing so close. It would have really sucked for about 20 different reasons if we'd been forced to cancel; we've had to keep working on the rest of the event planning while the permits were in limbo. (things like having t-shirts made, securing timing services, securing a DJ, wrangling volunteers, promoting the event to get people to sign up for it, etc etc).

Small silver linings: Now we know exactly what we will need to do next year for this event. We also have more lead time to get working on repeating the whole permitting process for the regatta we hold every September. That, of course (of course!!), relies on a separate insurance source, but at least I can give the relevant entity in that case the example insurance paperwork we gathered for this event.

Oh, and also, I have a teammate who is willing to take over this particular set of paperwork filing tasks for next year! The handoff will require some work, but I just think it will be far better for all of us to have more than one person versed in how to navigate this whole bureaucratic nightmare, and this particular teammate has much more relevant experience than me in doing this sort of stuff.

This all meant that this morning's project of going out to measure and mark our event's course was fun, finally, instead of being clouded by uncertainty.