Sunday Final

Today was Hele On Kailua meeting day.
I'm telling you, time is just flying by!
We are now 42 days out and counting and it seems like the list of things we need to take care of never ends.
The things I cross off never seems to catch up to the things that get added on.
Which may not be a good thing as I go back to work in eight days and I'm not sure how much time I'm going to have once school starts.
I mean my responsibilities are different now and I need to put first things first.
If you know what I mean.
We finally have some other folks from Kailua involved, or at least interested so that may help out some.
Our main concern is still funding, something we are very much lacking.
We are waiting on two major sponsors, waiting to see what kind monetary donations we are getting besides the volunteer and other contributions they are making.
One of the big hold ups for us is the IRS approval thing as most places want all your paperwork together.
A couple of places have given us funds considering our IRS thing as pending and applied for, but others need to see the Federal tax thingy.
In some ways, I can see now how we as a group, rushed into all of this.
Good intentions are sometimes just that, and it would have helped us if we had someone with more experience in putting something like this together.
Actually it's not really the logistical part of the event, more the fund raising and making contacts.
Our timing is not exactly great either as all the politicos are running for re-election right now and the House and Senates seats are basically open.
Still, the City and County backing has helped us with the permitting and the hiring of Special Duty Officers for traffic.
The state Department of Health is now onboard, giving us some funds and some water bottles to give away.
The DOH is also running the B-Cycle program in Kailua and they are looking at ways to promote their bicycle kiosks.
Things are slowly coming together.
The key word being slowly.
I get the feeling that we'll be putting this together up until event minus one day and that my hopes of having all the commitments from the vendors will not get done as planned.
I've also been thinking some about the overall mission of the event.
I think we need to look at different initiatives, not just bicycling and health and fitness.
Perhaps if we got the green folks, the sustainability folks involved, we could reach a whole new demographic of people and possible sponsors.
I think that closed streets thing is great, but we need to make some revisions so that it caters particulary towards the way the city and our streets are set up.
We'll have time to think about it after this is all over.
For now though, I have this week and a couple of days next week to clear my work sheet:

Wait.
That's only the first page.
Make that I'll try my best to clear my worksheet.
As long as nothing else gets thrown my way.
If you know what I mean.