my heart runs on gasoline vapors

I'm beyond tired, but the festival continues to go swimmingly. I had to take someone to the Des Moines airport today, which isn't what I wanted to be doing, but it was in some ways a nice way to get a little time to myself (at least on the way back). And the artist was a delightful person to chat with, so at least that all worked out okay. And [censored] checked in with the brigade at the soda fountain wall for me and found that they were well under control, with multiple layers of command structure (and plenty of snacks), so at least I knew they were in good hands.

After I got back, I ate lunch at my house, grabbed some tings, considered taking a nap, and decided against it. I checked in at the soda fountain and found that morale was still high (and lots of people were stopping by, so I talked to several of them). Then I went into the Fairgrounds, where morale was also high but chaos was even higher. It wasn't that bad, though - just a million details to deal with, and not enough time.

But we made it through the afternoon, and then we had our recognition dinner / benefit auction for the mural festival. [Censored] said that the [censored] was like [censored] and this was a [censored] concert, which won joke of the night, but I can't tell you because [censored] is v. private. That said, the dinner ticket was a hot commodity, and we basically filled the event center. My parents, [censored], and Aunt B and Uncle B came (due to being donors, being my +1, and being gifted someone's tickets that had already changed hands a couple of times). I did not sit with them to eat, since I was too busy helping with the dinner flow, but the food that I had later was pretty tasty.

All in all, the evening was great - we thanked a lot of people and sold a lot of incredible art. I was v. happy to win the auction for the Chautauqua mural, which I love; we also kept the Coca-Cola mural in the family, which was great since the lead painter for that is a total character. But the Farm Aid piece was the first time the public is seeing a sneak preview of the much bigger mural, and it was incredible - an amazing work of art, and also deeply emotional for a lot of people here (myself included).

So, the auction was a smashing success, we raised a bunch of money, and it's all good. I talked to some people after, then made it to the soda fountain right as it closed so that I could celebrate with a malt (almost as good as Milford used to make). And then I talked to [censored]/Aunt B/Uncle B for a couple of hours. And now, I really need to crash, since the festival still goes all day tomorrow - goodnight!