Eleven hours from now, at the grand hour of 6 a.m., two people named Howard and Andy will be calling me from the gate to my apartment complex. We will then go zipping away in Howard's Lexus, stopping to pick up another sleepy soul, and then making our way to the Sacramento International airport. (It's nice to know people who can actually be convinced to drive you to the airport at such an hour.)

Ten-and-a-half hours from now, I will be experiencing the new way of checking in for a flight. Hopefully the ride to the airport will be more exciting than the actual stay at the airport itself.

Thirteen-and-a-half hours from now, I and nine other people from work will be on board a United airplane, bound for Denver. From there, we'll hop on another plane, and eventually land in New Orleans at 4:08 local time. We'll then have the thrill of finding the shuttle to the Hyatt hotel, where we'll meet up with a couple more people and check into our rooms -- three rooms for 12 people, three of whom are females. (Ahem. Stop thinking before you start.)

What will happen next? Ah, who knows. We'll be in New Orleans through Saturday, attending the National College Media Convention, sponsored by the Associated Collegiate Press, along with some 3,000 other college journalists from across the country. The whole Hyatt is ours, and the days will be filled with all sorts of events.

Of course, that's not all we'll be doing. After all, we're "minutes away" (to quote the Hyatt's Web site, but we think it's more like "a bunch of minutes away") from Bourbon Street and the French Quarter, and we're all determined to have a good time. Somewhere in between, we'll fall over and sleep for a few hours, but we also know that we'll be cramming as much as we can into the three-and-a-half days that we'll be there.

We arrive back in Sacramento at 11:26 p.m. Saturday, just in time to step into high gear the following day and put out a newspaper in two days. Oh, and we might have homework to do, since we're missing three days of classes. (That's not stopping any of us from going, though.)

I'll be so busy when I get home that I probably won't do anything on RinkWorks other than check memos until next Tuesday night. I've never been away from RinkWorks for that long before, so hopefully I won't suffer from too much withdrawal.

For now,
-Ellmyruh