The Calm Before The Storm

Posted by on July 30, 2015

It’s 9:54pm. The kids are asleep. Tamara is in Fredericton until late. And here I am sitting in my office thinking about what is about to transpire over the course of the next few days, and then Saturday.

In August of 2013, me and my friend Ken began minor discussions about hosting our own geocaching “mega” event. For those who haven’t seen my barrage of Facebook posts over the last few months, a mega event is one that has 500 or more attendees. For the one we are doing, it’s basically a geocaching trade show.

Vendors, games, kids activities, educational seminars, and a ton of other stuff are all going to go down on August 1st, 2015 at the Moncton Wesleyan. Me and Tamara will be there at 7am and the doors open at 9am for paid registrants. Once those doors open, the insanity will begin.

So right now, I’m enjoying the quiet time in the house. I bought some malleable board to pin some maps to for the event, but I am as far from crafty as can be and have no good way to put a banner on the top to indicate what it is. I printed off a bunch of words in big letters and draped them over the top of the sign. Hopefully Tamara can make it look nicer than I did cuz God only knows it looks crappy right now.

The mega is kind of a big deal. I know most of the people I know could care less about geocaching, but it has become a big part of my life. This event is the biggest thing I have ever had a major hand in putting together. Between this mega and last year’s Amazing Race stuff, there seems to be big things all around.

To put it into perspective, people from Ontario, Quebec, BC, Alberta, Nova Scotia, PEI, Newfoundland, and possibly Manitoba are to be in attendance. We’ve got registrations from people in Boston, New York City, and I think I saw some from California possibly or somewhere in Texas too I think. And lastly, we’ve got folks from Germany, Finland, and I think the Netherlands coming to this event. Ya, really. That far away to come to Moncton all of all places to celebrate using multi-million dollar equipment to find Tupperware and film canisters in the woods. Sounds kind of crazy doesn’t it?

But at the same time, right now, there’s a sort of inner peace I am experiencing. There are SO many things that have gone into the planning of this event. Two years in the making in some regards. 18 months of planning. But as it was mentioned today at our first “satellite event”, now it’s all about the execution. We planned it well. Now we need to execute it well.

So with this inner peace I am experiencing, I’m wondering if this is just purely my mind allowing myself to be relaxed before the big day. Or, is it that I am becoming more and more accustomed to some of these larger scale projects that I feel a bit more confident. I’d like to think it’s the former. If it’s the latter, than I wonder if I’m becoming a bit  too full of myself. I really hope that’s not the case but I would like to think that after having seen other events continue to scale up and beyond what they were intended to, and them continue to do well, I suppose it is a possibility that I’m getting used to it.

I took some medication to help with my sleep tonite and I can feel it starting to kick in. Before I start making less sense of myself, it’s time to go to bed. I’ll post a recap of the mega once it’s all done. I am pretty excited to see how it goes.

Leave a Reply