Conference Going

I went to my first library conference for the last several days.  I left on Wednesday afternoon and drove to Ft. Worth with Matt following behind me in his car.  He took his own car because he had to come back early to work on Saturday.  I stayed through the end and was glad because I finally got to attend a fairly useful session in addition to hearing Nia Vardalos and Neil Gaiman speak.  The rest of the conference was hit or miss.  They had some other interesting speakers like JR Martinez and Dan Ariely.  Some of the sessions were good, but others weren’t very helpful or informative.  I struggled to stay awake in some of them.  But I did get a lot of information to take back with me and new ideas to try next year. 

When the conference was over, I headed over to Garland to see my cousin, Amanda, and her family who just moved there from San Diego.  I’m excited that they are now in Texas and are relatively close.  I left their place a little after 6:00 yesterday.  Most of the drive was uneventful.  I was kind of tired, but had a Dr. Pepper and a coke to wake up.  When I got to Austin, there was a brief stint of heavy rain.  It was gone by the time I got out of the city limit, but when I got to San Antonio, it was storming pretty hard and I was driving with white knuckles on the steering wheel until I got home.  I think we’re supposed to get more storms tonight.  We could use the rain.  Matt has been trying to get the yard looking nice and there are some spots that just need a lot of water. 

We went to church this morning at 10:30.  I had to settle for the Blue Haired choir because Fiesta was going on and we couldn’t go to other one we intended.  That and I needed to sleep in this morning.  I had my concert this afternoon.  I needed to practice some parts of my music, but I never found the time.  So I faked a few spots in the music.  The concert was very long – two hours, but we had Mariachi players for about half an hour of it.  After the concert, Matt and I went to a Mexican restaurant across from the venue.  I had enchiladas and a very large margarita that made me very happy.  I wanted to go to Kohl’s afterward, but I decided that I just wanted to sit at home and do nothing.  I’ve been going nonstop since Monday so I think I deserve this time to just relax.