On The Road Again...

Hey folks

Sorry it's been a bit since I checked in with you all... as you might imagine, I was pretty busy running around putting out fires that had cropped up while I was in Idaho. Now that things have somewhat settled, it's time for me to hit the road again for what I jokingly call "My National Tour."

More-than-infrequent readers of my blog (and some of you infrequent readers, too) know that from time to time I role-play for the Oregon "Node" of the Clinical Trials Network, a sub-division of the National Institutes of Health. Essentially, I portray a client at a treatment center that's a site for a drug trial or study being run by the NIH; my job is to go into the site and improvise. I've got a "character" I play who's going to be taking part in the study being run at the site, and I go through the intake process with the practitioners, then give them feedback on how things went and what they might be able to improve on.

Back in March of this year I was hired by the CTN to play a meth addict going through intake process for a study on the effectiveness of 12-Step programs as a component to drug treatment (you can read all about the study by clicking here). I did a session at a local drug treatment center here in Portland, and the CTN was so impressed by the results that they gave "ORNode" a grant to fly me around the country to other treatment centers.

So, for the next two months, I'm going to be doing a lot of traveling... I've already done one session up in Everett, WA (in fact, I just got back last night). The rest of the schedule looks like this:

• September 8: Pittsburgh, PA
• September 10: Dallas, TX
• September 16: Jacksonville, FL (hopefully they will have cleaned up from this weekend's hurricanes)
• October 1: Oahu, HI (yeah, I know... that's going to be an awfully tough session. I might need an extra day there to prepare for it...)
• October 8: Eugene, OR
• October 13: Charleston, SC

Not so bad, right? Just six days... until you take into account the fact that I'll be traveling one day before and one day after each session... so I'll be spending about 18 days out of town over the next couple months (20 if you count my trip to Everett this week). Essentially, that's one day out of every three... oi! I'm going to miss Trish and the doggies so much...

Anyway, that's what's going to be consuming my time over the next little bit... somewhere in there I'm going to have to squeeze in a trip up to see my family in Washington (should have taken an extra day when I was in Everett! What was I thinking??), and the filming of The Bicyclists. Add to that Wild Bills' Murder For Sale public shows that start up on October 3... and I'm going to have a VERY busy time of it.

Sleep seems like a mythical creature whispered about in tribal tales handed down from father to son...

Anyhoo, I'll try and make some posts (with photos) from the many exotic locations I'm headed to. In the mean time... hope you're all doing well!

-Harold