i am exhausted tonight. i thought i was doing okay, but after dinner i completely and totally crashed. i fell asleep on the bed around 7:15 and steve had to wake me up and let me know that the pistons were on and that i should probably not go to bed so early since it'll mess my sleep schedule up. but i want to! i am like a walking zombie!!!
here's why: i had to leave the safety and comfort of my little home on sunday at 10 am (criminal!) and head to the airport so that i could go to a two-and-a-half day internet media conference. it amazed me, because we're still debating (arguing) over the same points that we were three years ago when i left this space! nuts! but that's not really the only reason we were there: we were provided with big name keynote speakers that (i guess) were supposed to inspire us (interesting, but not very relevant) and we were supposed to schmooze (which i did). lots of other people apparently thought that the last point meant that we also were supposed to drink lots of alcohol, but since my stomach is still acting funky (over a week now where i've had digestive problems -- maybe i should see someone about that...), i wisely kept my socializing to one or two drinks (which really were as much of an accessory drink as anything else). anyhow, the reason i am so tired tonight is that this event was at a resort on the chesapeake bay in maryland. in the past they've been in ultra-glamorous hotels in scottsdale and beaver creek. i suppose this was supposed to be nice too, but...
1. it was over an hour and a half from the nearest major airport (baltimore), which SUCKED since i had to leave before 7 to return my rental car and get on my 10 am flight (since there are only a couple of direct flights each day from baltimore and i had a client meeting this afternoon).
2. there was DIAL-UP internet access only in our hotel rooms -- a HUGE snafu for an internet conference (the weird thing is that the resort is only about a year old and that the organizers kept saying that when they booked this a year ago they were told that the hotel would be wired with high-speed access by now. i think that must have been a line of hooey since you don't usually build a brand-new hotel and then wire it later)
3. it was hot and humid and when the sun went down (and our evening cocktail parties were outside) there were tons of bugs. i wore skirts in the evenings since it was so hot, but now my legs have bug bites on them. ew.

so yeah, i went to that and then had superfun getting up early to head back today so that i could go and sit an listen to big announcements/internal meetings about next year's marketing plans. woohoo! initially the meeting was supposed to be at 2 and so getting into the airport around noon was perfect. it gave me time to reclaim my bags, get all of the way to long-term parking, find some food somewhere, change into something nice and then go to my client's office. well, two days ago they moved the meeting to 4 pm. so i ended up done at the airport at 12:30, with a 15 minute drive to my client's office. i debated driving into town to go to the office for awhile, but since it can be up to an hour each way with traffic, that would have been dumb. so i went to the mall across the street from my client's office. i very wisely decided to take out the "client meeting" clothes that i had very carefully ROLLED (not folded) and put at the top of my suitcase. it's a darn good thing, too: i hadn't noticed that the TSA had looked in my bag, and in the process they had wedged my skirt and sweater set. it looked really bad. i was able to salvage a sweater, but decided that it'd be easier to find some sort of skirt or pants at the mall than to somehow try to un-wrinkle the skirt. i must have looked like a zombie at the mall, but it worked and i found a skirt and then got the call that the meeting had been moved up to 3 pm. and then i changed and finally everything came together and went as planned. hoooray!!!

so now i'm home and half-watching the pistons, hoping they can keep their lead. i'm glad they're more awake than i am!

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happy thought of the day: as i drove home from the client meeting i drove through grant park to columbus avenue and noticed that, for the first time since i moved, buckingham fountain was turned on and the water was shooting up majestically, welcoming me back to what's starting (finally!) to feel like home.

http://www.zone.ee/usapage/pics/Chicago/Buckingham%20Fountain%202.jpg