Today’s blog is brought to you by the construction work taking place at Hazelhurst. Right. Outside. My. Window. Construction workers are using what sounds like leaf-blowers to blow away the concrete dust they’re creating by jackhammering all morning. These workers are sadists apparently.
Things aren’t much quieter inside of Hazelhurst either. It’s exhibition change-over day so things are quite frantic. I think I saw Carrie three times. Once for her to say hello and tell me to book a jumping castle, once for me to ask if I could get involved in the change-over at all (don’t get excited, I didn’t get to), and once to ask her a question.
Everyone in the gallery is quite frazzled. People keep walking past me with sheets of board sandwiching what looked like used bubble gum (this turned out to be some of Rosie Deacon’s art work. Oops). So, completely unnoticed in the frantic building, I get on with trying to book a jumping castle for this children’s festival Hazelhurst are holding a few weeks.
It’s here that I’m going to warn you that this blog is almost entirely about the angst involved in hiring a jumping castle (quite possibly the only time a jumping castle has ever caused angst).
To be honest I am not ready for this level of responsibility. My first thought was, quite literally “do not f**k this up Nicola, this jumping castle hire costs more than a month’s rent”. The anxiety was not helped by the fact that I had to make a whole bunch of decisions about the hire, without much input from Carrie (who was understandably busy). In the end I just sort of guessed my way through the booking process, using my best judgement where I didn’t have a definite answer. Coincidentally this is pretty the same approach I use in exams.
Having processed the booking, I then got told a wedding party is having their photos taken in the Hazelhurst grounds the next morning. So I email back the hire company asking them if the castle will be gone by that time.
“Only if you can provide someone to help lift the castle. It needs to people to lift and that can be difficult to find an extra man on a Saturday night.”
…
I spend the next 30 minutes trying to find Carrie to ask her if we’ll be able to provide someone to help out. Somehow she has slipped back to her desk while I was searching the gallery for her.
In the end I did manage to get the hire sorted. It took me three hours but it got done. Either I’m very shit at hiring jumping castles or this experience goes to show how organising something seemingly simple can be far more complex when you’re organising it for a large group.
My afternoon was spent desperately trying to stay off Facebook. I had a few tasks I could go on with, but they weren’t urgent. In fact when I did try to go on with making a list of Vital Signs artworks, I ended up somehow changing the default language in Microsoft Word to French. This undoubtedly happened because I bragged about being great at Word in my last blog. That will show me.
I went and had a look at the exhibition change over. Everyone was so busy I could just walk around and no one even noticed. I’ve noticed how there’s an install team that the gallery has that only come in when an exhibition needs to be changed over. I wonder what they do when they’re not here – do they just spend all their time installing exhibitions around Sydney? Is there like some kind of pro exhibition-install circuit they’re all on?
While no one really needed me to do anything I went and made friends with the barista at the Hazelhurst’s café. She’s studying Maths at UOW next session which I thought was pretty cool. The rest of the day I spent bullying myself into doing semi-productive stuff in the lead up to the Vital Signs exhibition, still two months away. But considering I started writing this blog (and doing other assignments) I perhaps wasn’t so successful!
pigeontoed typewriter 