Less than a week away now

Well, finally, the excitement and anticipation is starting to build. Less than a week from now, I, along with quite a few others, will be fully immersed in sessions on all sorts of interesting and useful topics.

I'm already keeping an eye on the long-range weather forecasts, and it looks like it's going to by typically Pacific Northwest in March: cool (low to mid 50s by day, high 30s to low 40s at night), cloudy, and rainy. Sigh.

It looks like the attendee numbers are going to be pretty good. Not like the DotCom heyday where we'd see more than 1000 folks jammed into the Sheraton in Seattle (those were the days!), but still pretty good.

Meanwhile, I just reduced my company's cost to send me. I'm driving up, and just got rid of my first "fun" car, a PT Cruiser with leather seats, alloy wheels, moonroof, and everything else, that I'd been driving for a year and a half, but got an increasingly painful 22 MPG, and bought a Honda Civic Hybrid. that should cut fuel costs in about half for the trip.

While I expect the long drive to be a bit daunting, I was looking forward to it. The potential of driving in the rain, however, has dampened what enthusiasm I had.

I'm already laying out the newsletter and getting in event items that I know will be happening. I've learned that by doing this advance work, I end up managing to get to bed at reasonable hours on conference days. having the newsletter cut back to a single page (it was a 4-pager back in the aforementioned heyday, requiring not a little more work) and being able to print fewer copies myself.

I'm definitely looking forward to seeing familiar faces that I see usually only this once a year, and I will lament some faces who cannot make it. I do hear that it's not too late, and maybe some miracle will get a few more folks in.