Okay. A bit more an elaboration.
Day one: Didn't have to cut any wood, which is good because it raining like crazy. For once, the other woodbusters got there before me and had a nice stash to work from. Not a lot of people showed up, so I ended up downing a bottle of scotch in just under two hours. It gets kind of hazy from here. I was told that I assisted another firetender in testing the structural integrity of a lawn chair (i.e, he sat in it, and said "Sparta kick me!" I evidently decided a flying tackle was safer. The chair looks like it was hit by a truck.)
Day two (getting bad now...): Still didn't have to cut any wood. Awesome. No sleep from here on out. Fire was smallish (6 foot) and didnt' require too much effort. Got some good cardio in flipping logs. Also, brought out the CoC #2. Getting closer to closing it. Ash works okay as a chalk substitute, but not great.
We had an accident on the fire crew. One of our members slipped on the stone ring around the pit and went into the coals. He did what he had to do and rolled on his forearm and lower back. He is okay, but his left arm looks like it is panther spotted from the burns. Only a few will scar, but that is still a huge failure on our parts. He, of course, opted not to go to the hospital. Our first aid crew took care of him, and he was tending again the next night. Went off duty around 4 A.M. Got drunk again. Ugh.
Day three: (the day it all went wrong) We decided to cut down a tree that was dead in a nearby stream. This was tricky, but it resulted in a burnable hut-sized bowl of roots and a fair amount of base logs, etc. After that, it went to shit. The chainsaw went down. Then the backup chainsaw went down. The tractor on site went down. Basically, we felled this awesome burnding (burnable building) for nothing. The stream will almost certainly claim it before we are back at that site again (next year). Sigh.
Anyway, we still needed some wood, so I got work, old school lumberjack style. I felled a tree with an axe (first time doing this) and proceeded to cut it up. It was partially hollow, so that helped a lot. It was about 12-14 inches in diameter, and took about 10 minutes to fell.
Then, the rain came. A tornado was spotted near our location. Two of us bit the bullet and built the fire anyway, just in case the rain stopped. It didn't. It was slowing down, but it took its sweet time to do it.
Basically, three people sat out in the rain and made sure the fire stayed lit. The rain stopped after three hours, and the party ensued. I now have the onset of cold or worse, and to top it off, I got food poisoning from some undercooked meat. I tried to sleep, but the discomfort in my stomach was too much. I got up in time to call into work and to see that my car was now mired in from all the rain. Great.
Impressions: Worst festival experience this year. Glad I have a month off before the next one. I'm happy with the grip progression I've made so far, but other than that, I should have stayed home.