July 8th 2010 A Week of Meetings.

A few meetings this week. One with Craig Carnihan from the American Composers Forum who administer the Mc Knight Foundation Visiting Composer Fellowship, one with Amy Barrett from the Minnesota DNR, and one with fellow composer and head of the Southern Theater's McKnight Program, Mary Ellen Childs. Each of these meetings and some practical motivation but I was pleasantly surprised that each of them yielded some great ideas related to the hike itself including the possibility of posting a recorded hike on the DNR and McKnight foundation Website as well as posting a video taped preview tour that will occur July 18th on the DNR website. I will post it here as well once it is up.

Other meetings were of a more personal nature and included getting back in touch with many old friends from my Minneapolis days, some of whom I had not seen since around 2001. the last 9 years that I have been a Chicago resident have really flown by, I was pleased to find that even though Minneapolis had changed quite a bit since then, the people I knew had not. That is to say, they are still people from whom I have been able to draw a great deal of inspiration. It was nice to see that even though many of our lives have gone in different directions, the sam enthusiasm for music and life in general that sort of drew us together was still there. On a less tangential note, some of these friends have volunteered to come out to the parks and assist with noise making and various other necessities (like keeping me company) during the run of the actual tours in August and September.