This morning, I churned through e-mail, mostly for Kriti. We've had a good run of new attendees lately: Mira Kamdar, Mallika Dutt, Prof. C.M. Naim, Prof. Clinton Seely. Several other academics said they would come if they could, but apparently the U of C has a November trip to India that a bunch of them are going on. Ah well. We should still have a nice solid academic panel, and a political writing panel. Very pleasing.
I think at this point, what's mostly left is just to invite some more biggish writers. I would personally love to have Amitav Ghosh attend, for example. We have a Kriti planning meeting on Monday, and we can hopefully figure out then how many more people we can afford to invite. (We need to start pushing people to pre-register too, to help us assess ticket sales.) Once we do that, invite those people, get that locked down, then we can just put out an open call for others who want to participate as panelists and readers -- we won't be able to offer them any money this year, but if they have publications, it's a good promotional opportunity, so some may come based on that too. I'm hoping to do that by July 1st, to give people lots of time to plan, but we'll see if that actually happens.
At 1 p.m., I came to my new condo to meet a plumber. We're very tempted to run water up to the roof, so that if we plant a garden on the deck there, we won't have to tote water up the stairs, undoubtedly sloshing it all over the place. It looks like if we do it, the best option is to run a pipe up the outside of the building, which means we don't have to worry about knocking down drywall or pieces of our ceiling -- which also means that there's no rush to get it done before we move in. Good, since we probably can't really afford to do it anytime soon, if we do it at all. Also spent a while walking around marking down on my floor plan where all the cable and phone jacks are, so we can better figure out how we're going to lay things out in the new place. We're going to need to buy at least one piece of furniture, I think -- our current place has a built in desk and shelves for printer and office supplies and like, and the new place doesn't, so some kind of business armoire thing is probably going to happen.
After that, I wandered around until I found a cafe with wireless in the new neighborhood -- caffe DeLuca, about five blocks away, I think. Good food, comfortable atmosphere, and free wifi if you order something. The only problem is the dearth of outlets -- there's only about 3, and one's in smoking, so it's not so easy to snag a good one. I got one, though. :-)
A bit more dealing with festival planning e-mail, and then hopefully some writing.
It occurs to me that just using a garden hose to the roof when you need it, rather than a permanent pipe, might well save the headache of another pipe which could freeze in the winter, especially if it is going to be outdoors.
We may do that, but it’s also simple apparently to drain the pipe when winter approacheth. 🙂