I stayed home today. Well, more accurately, I went to work and turned around and came home again. Too dizzy to be of any use. I mean I'm fine if I don't move my head. :-) Since my computer wasn't working yesterday (some sort of bug in the anti-virus upgrade apparently, knocked out half our computers) and I didn't trust it would be up and running again today, no point in sitting there. I'm hoping I'm improved tomorrow since we have a department lunch at Farmers and Fishers to celebrate the end of the festival. I'm not good at being unwell, it doesn't suit me.

Anyway, Tuesday's NEA meeting was pretty interesting. We met with the five department directors (but not Rocco the chair). While the NEA is really not a very effective organization, at least it seems they are aware of that and are trying to make positive policy changes to respond to the community. They are still handcuffed by the Maplethorpe (spelling?) issues from the 80s (ooh pictures of naked people! scandal!) and so still will not fund individual artists. They will also not fund any operational or overhead costs, so they will only fund an individual project by a company or organization with charitable status. This is pretty limiting. And yet of course, they want to fund cutting edge work. No wonder they only get 300 dance applications a year. Many of their current grants are also only at the $10,000 level. So your organization, large enough to be able to support its infrastructure through other means, is supposed to do all the work (and these grants are massive undertakings) for $10,000. This is one of the areas they are changing and are increasing their minimum grant amount. Anyway, it was an interesting meeting to be at as basically a fly on the wall and very glad to not immediately be affected by this organization.