7/7/7

a big day for the Live Earth concerts, with over 10,000 house parties around the world participating. i know there are a lot of cynics who criticize this sort of global event as ineffective, but i find it inspiring to see large masses of people gathering together, surrounding an issue with music.

today was a saturday, but Juli and i kept working. turned into a pretty long day. im just going to ramble...

In the morning, Jason and I touched base about the website, calling out priorities. Top on the list is getting the new Road to Oprah site operational. It's a bit more complicated than originally anticipated as we are planning to integrate the same user database as this site, so all our producers can help us set up events on our Road Trip. it's getting close, and looks really good. hopefully we will have something up this week. Jason is also keeping an eye on the double login issue, which apparently a lot of Durpal sites are running into.

we had two volunteers come by today to help, Talia DiMarco, who we met at our Mr. T's Bowl Fundraise, and Lisa Dee, a trained opera singer (and member of The Love Punks, who will be touring with us this fall :). It was great having some more help today.

Talia helped update our volunteer database, assembling all of the offers of support our producers have been sending via their producer profiles. I was surprised to see how many people had filled them out! About 58 folks, which is awesome. I'm sorry we haven't contacted you all yet, we are totally behind. We actually weren't able to view who all had filled in their volunteer preferences until recently- Jason just programmed it into a view module. The data is still a little cumbersome to access, so Talia spent several hours today assembling it into a spreadsheet.

Lisa started researching potential sponsorships while helping fill in the paperwork for our MPAA rating (we are submitting The 1 Second Film for an official rating!)

Lisa saw the enormous mountain of stuff we are trying to coordinate. She asked if it was possible to pull it all off in 11 weeks. probably not, but we are going to give it our best shot, and do as much as we can.

We are less than 11 weeks from the road trip, and still don't even have a bus! Levi is up in Fresno today meeting a highschool history teacher named Patrick who has a passion for Crown school busses (the type of bus we are looking for). Patrick refurbishes busses, loads them up with medical supplies, and sends them down to South America to help folks out in need. I think that is awesome. haven't heard back from Levi yet, but am hopeful that Patrick has a bus for us...

We need to raise some real funds sometime soon for our Road Trip... fundraising is still inching along, but we need to accelerate. On that front, Juli and I continue to put together our sponsor packets, which are coming along. I'm plugging away at the graphic design while Juli helps with copy, and keeps up with the press stuff.

Speaking of press, I did my first radio interview yesterday. I was a bit nervous, but Juli thought i did okay. I'll be doing another radio interview early Monday morning on Live 88.5 in Ottawa...at 7am! sheesh. my nerves will probably still be sleeping.

Tomorrow I'm going to take some time off for grocery shopping. All I have in the fridge is this massive beet bought at the Farmer's market. Check this thing out + some pics from last week: