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Last year: I never promised to be consistent. |
Notes from the conference: (Stuff in italics are notes I took on my Palm.)
Monday: Two-thirds of the way to Richmond, I panic: I don't know how to get to the airport. Do I take the beltway (I-295) or head into the city? I think I remember driving in, but I also think I remember someone saying to take 295. I resolve to follow the signs. No sign points me to 295, so I drive past its exit, toward the city. Three miles later, there it is. The roads around the airport are confusing, but I make my way to the long-term parking. Over and over, I recite my parking location: South Garage, 3rd level, on the outside rim on the north side.
Getting my ticket is no problem, but they only give me the one boarding pass. It feels strange. I'm not used to direct flights. There will be at least an hour before boarding. I'm glad I brought a book and the chips from my 10:30 "lunch" at Subway, but I don't regret being early. I hate feeling rushed.
Dad met me at my gate when I arrived in Chicago - he'd landed maybe half an hour earlier. We picked up his rental car and made our way to the hotel, which was only maybe half a mile from O'Hare. I called Matt to let him know I'd made it to town safely, then I called Jill to let her know we had arrived. Dad and I went out to a grocery store for snacks and drinks (the soda machine in the hotel wanted 80 cents for a 12-oz can!) and when we got back, I had a message from Jill - she was on her way.
She and Dad and I went out to eat at a wonderful Italian restaurant. I forgot the name right away, of course. The portions were all enormous, though, and the food was amazingly good. I had gnocchi in tomato-vodka sauce, and Dad and Jill both had cheese and spinach mannicotti. I wanted dessert, but I knew I couldn't eat a whole one by myself, and there had been much more mannicotti than gnocchi, so Dad and Jill were both too full to help me.
Tuesday: I woke up at about 6:30 with the strange thought that Matt, a time zone away, was already on his way to work. At about 8:45, I met Dad for breakfast, and then we met Roger and took the shuttle over to the convention center. After Roger and I stood in line for a while to get badges, we headed into the booth area.
The convention center was enormous. Bigger than enormous. Enormously enormous. The single room housing the booths was the size of a Sam's Club warehouse. There were other rooms for cafeterias, for meetings, for seminars, for registration...
Enough freebies in the first two hours to satisfy the whole office. Will probably get more anyway - can't have too many! My feet are killing me, though.
(1:30) It's terribly tempting to just catch a shuttle back to the hotel and veg for a few hours. This place is too big to really be comprehended. I think I've seen all of it I can really "get" - though I won $20 in a draw! Now I just want peace. Three more hours...
The $20 was kindof neat. This one booth had a huge bowl full of envelopes. After you filled out an info card for them, they'd let you pull an envelope from the bowl. Every envelope had a piece of paper with a prize listed on it - usually silly things like calculators or pens... But some of them indicated cash amounts. I won $20. Pretty cool.
If I go to one of these again, I know this time what I'll want to do: I'll want to grab one of the programs and sit down before I go into the booths, and mark booths doing technologies I'm interested in. I clued into this strategy too late to do me any good. Next time, also, I'll leave most of the loot-gathering until the last few hours. (Though some of it had to be snatched up before it was all gone: blinky-balls were very popular, as were the beanie toys. But by the end of the day, my bag was getting pretty heavy from the weight of t-shirts and pens and stressballs and other assorted junk.
Tuesday evening, Roger and Jack (who'd showed up around noon) planned to go into downtown Chicago to have dinner at Gino's East, an apparently famous pizza place. I wasn't sure any pizza could be worth the drive through rush-hour downtown traffic. By the time they called to say they were ready to go, my stomach was reading me the riot act for having sustained myself all day on a couple of pieces of freebie candy and a soda. I just knew I was too queasy to sit in a car for any length of time, so I declined, and took my book down to the restaurant attached to the hotel instead.
Wednesday: Pretty much the same routine as Tuesday, really, except that around 1:30 we all four met up and left the convention. Jack's plane home was due to leave at 3:15, and mine only an hour and a half later, so rather than make Dad and Roger brave O'Hare traffic more than once, I got to the airport way early. The only place to eat at the airport that was close to my gate was an ice cream parlor, and despite having plenty of time, I didn't feel like lugging my heavy carryon bags all the way to the other end of the terminal for McDonald's food. So I had an ice cream cone for dinner. (My diet was pretty well shot, yeah. I gained six pounds in those three days. Ouch.)
It seemed to take forever to get out of O'Hare, even after we got on the plane. I'm glad I brought a long book with me, because I was only about ten or so pages from the end by the time I we landed. But my car was right where I left it, I found the interstate with no problems, and I was home-again-home-again by shortly after nine.
I had fun. I want to go back again. But it was good to get home.
Word of the Day: riot act - a vigorous reprimand or warning
- Partners In Necessity by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
Current Projects:
- trying to figure out this expense report form
Diet Progress: 12 lbs lost (yeah, being on travel kicked my diet in the butt...)
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