Busy week as we make final preparations for this year's International Lindy Hop Championships, so not a lot of time for updates. I thought I'd take this opportunity to wheel another note from my Facebook vault. I wrote this at the end of the first ILHC last year.

At 1:00 pm on Friday afternoon, we got official access to all the meeting spaces at the hotel. At that moment we had planned for the sound and the floors to be installed simultaneously, plenty of time before the risers arrived and the chairs to be set up for the 8:00 pm opening of the ballroom for social dancing.

At 1:01 pm on Friday afternoon, I was standing in the middle of an empty ballroom.

The guy delivering the floor was at lunch, the sound guys were delayed, and the volunteers for floor set up were no where to be found.

Everything was going according to plan.

Before every event I like to make a time line and fill it with a forecasted play by play of how the weekend will unfold. It’s excruciating in its detail. It’s probably the most anal retentive thing I do. In the week before ILHC, I spent hours staring at its timeline, making adjustments, filling in details, and taking some out all while mentally watching the event play out over and over again in my head.

On Friday morning I walked into the hotel, headed up to the computers in the Club Lounge, opened the time line, and made some more adjustments before I printed it out all: 14 pages-landscaped with .25’ margins. Then I rolled it up, stuffed it in my back pocket, and never looked at it again for the rest of the weekend.

That’s not the plan I’m referring to.

My plan going into the weekend looked more like this: We have a working idea of what will happen, too many questions left to answer, and plenty things that will go wrong. However, no matter what, it was all going to be over Monday morning sometime after dawn.

The only thing I was wrong about was that we finished an hour and a half before dawn on Monday.