Monday, April 29, 2013 - Keynote in Baltimore

What a terrible night! This turned out to be the worst night I've had in a long time, if that's possible. There were creases in the layers below the sheets that formed welts on my body, the sheets were flat and wouldn't stay in place, so they were constantly bunching up and creating lumps, which woke me up practically every hour. I kept trying to smooth them out, but it was impossible, and the sheets were really rough, too. Then the alarm clock went off at 3:30, and I punched every button I could feel in the dark, hoping I had shut it off permanently, but worrying that it would come on again. Just managed to drift off to sleep when all of a sudden, the TV came on at 4:12 am! I had to scramble to find the remote, and because I hadn't even turned it on the night before, I didn't know which was the power button, so I had to struggle with that for a minute. I was still worried about the alarm clock, so I decided to turn the light on and straighten that out, then went back to bed, waiting a long time to get back to sleep, but finally did, and fell into a very deep sleep until 9:00. Good thing my event wasn't until the afternoon!!! If I had had to get up to do a training session at my usual time, I would have been a real mess! I took my time getting out of bed and getting ready, but before noon I headed downstairs to join my group for lunch. I sat through a couple of presentations before they split into plenary sessions, so I went up to my room again for a little while. Finally, it was time. Came downstairs, made a few lighting changes on the stage, and performed my 90 minute keynote speech/training to a quiet crowd of 150 engineers, but they received me well and seemed to enjoy themselves. Afterward, several came up to me to speak with me, then we headed out to a cocktail party with heavy hors d'oeuvres that substituted for dinner (which was fine with me!), before we headed to the company's entertainment section (called the Mike & Mike Show), which was a series of team exercises that were very entertaining, and in some cases, quite a workout! Very fun, and a great break fro the stress I've been dealing with for many weeks now. Headed up to the room, looking forward to a better night sleep.