ACL - Sunday night

Well, it's after midnight, so I'll try to keep this short.

This past week at work, I started a count-down of how many days of work I have left in June. I'm now down to four days of work in June.

Wednesday afternoon, we had a big storm come through the northern Virginia area. There was a tornado warning just as schools were letting out. Kids were kept late (by about an hour), instead of putting them on the bus or sending them out in the warning, the rain, the wind, and the lightning. The wind left branches and whole trees down all over the area. That also brought down a lot of electric lines. Power at the college was out well before 3:00 on Wednesday afternoon.

After finishing what I could at work, I headed home around 4:00. Jesse arrived home about the same time--his office in Sterling was out of power as well. Our house had electricity, though the digital clocks were flashing. When we went to work the next morning, we discovered that the electricity was still out at both of our places of work, as well as large sections of Leesburg. We worked from home. He got a call around 2:00 that there was electricity back on at his work, so he went in for the afternoon. Electricity wasn't expected at PHC until 5:00 or so.

There was no power at the clogging barn, so no way to e-mail people to cancel clogging. Practice was held on the stage behind the clogging barn with music from our portable Bose CD player running on batteries.

Friday, power was back on at work. There had been a clogging board meeting scheduled for Friday night. Two of the board members had made plans to attend the baccalureate for one of the graduating cloggers to present a scholarship. The baccalureate was scheduled for Thursday night, but got re-scheduled for Friday night due to the power-outage. We decided to go ahead with the board meeting after the baccalureate. So the meeting started around 9:30 and finished just before midnight.

In my car after the meeting, I found a beautiful love letter with a rose, a bracelet, and a hair stick! I'm afraid I didn't express my appreciation as well as I would've liked, as I was so tired and stressed.

Saturday morning, we were up at 7:00. Jesse dropped me off at the metro station, so that I could go to the Takoma campus of Montgomery College to teach an information literacy class for Nyack College. I arrived about 30 minutes late, due to not being familiar enough with the bus portion of the public transportation system. The day went very smoothly overall. There were a minor hic-up with access to the databases, but I went with an easy work-around that still allowed us to search all the needed databases, so hopefully it didn't hurt the students too much. For the first time, I taught this class in a lab where the students could follow-along as I demonstrated the searches. I think this made the lab assignments go MUCH better, as for the first time, all the students finished their assignments in the provided lab time. Previously, there would be large portions of the class that would still need additional lab time at the end of the day to finish the assignments that were due before they left. We even finished the class about 30 minutes early! I'm still hoping I didn't forget some significant piece.

While I was teaching the class, JM was off with the clogging group performing at Celebrate Fairfax and then taking in the festivities. After he came and picked me up, we went over to the home of one of the clogger graduates and joined them for the cook-out they were doing in celebration of the graduation that had happened that morning. When the rest of the clogging group headed back to Celebrate Fairfax to catch the fireworks, we headed home.

We made it home around 9:30. I then spent the next 2.5 hours or so packing for the week at ACL.

The alarm went off at 7:00 again on Sunday morning so that JM could take me to the airport before picking up coffee to go to breakfast service at church. He left me at the airport at about 8:45 for my 10:15 flight. When I checked in, everything appeared fine with the flight. By the time I made it to the gate, the monitor was showing a delay until 10:45. Then it was pushed back to 11:15. Then delayed again to 11:45 with a gate change (to the next gate over). [One of the other passengers, a daughter of a pilot, said they also gave us a new plane that was probably originally scheduled to make the 12:15 flight to Boston.] The monitor just showed "airplane maintenance" as the cause for the delay. When we got on the plane, the pilot mentioned that maintenance was scrambling to try to figure out why one of the flight controls was binding up on our originally scheduled plane. Hopefully they got it figured out so that the 12:15 passengers would have our plane to fly to Boston.

So instead of arriving in Boston at 11:30, I was just boarding the plane to Boston at 11:30 and landed in Boston shortly after 1:00. I found my way to the Shared Van Pick-up, where the college was picking up conference attendees once an hour. By the time the shuttle arrived, I had met up with five more conference attendees.

As I arrived on campus (about 2:20), I ran into Alison and Beth who were just getting ready to head on the Adams homes tour. They delayed long enough for Denise (who had also just arrived in the shuttle) and me to check-in and take our stuff up to the room. We made it on the 3:15 tour.

I very much enjoyed it! Being a librarian, I would have to say that my favorite part was the library that had been built next door to the Old House to house the books of John Quincy Adams--about 12,000 volumes! We four librarians had our picture taken in front of the library. I'll have to get a copy from Alison for my library picture collection.

Alison started feeling a bit sick during the tour and Denise wasn't feeling great either. So we got them back to campus where they could get a drink and rest. Beth lives in the area and already had plans with her family for the evening, but she took the time to take me by Wendy's to pick up some supper, since I hadn't eaten much all day and was starting to feel it. As I arrived back on campus, I got a call from Jennifer E. who was wanting to know if I'd arrived and was ready for supper. She watched me eat my Wendy's take-out, then we headed out to find her something to eat. We ran into Charles as we were leaving campus, so he joined us to look for some supper. They ate at Friendly's and I enjoyed being with them.

We then took a walk along the beach. The campus is only about three blocks away. It was beautiful!

Back on-campus, we met up with other friends in the student center and spent a bit of time catching up. Part of the group decided to head back out and walk to CVS to pick up various items that hadn't gotten packed.

I headed back up to my room. Jennifer E and I chatted until Alison and Denise came back from CVS. We all talked until nearly midnight. Before Alison and Denise made it back, Lynette locked herself out of her room, so dropped by our room to call security to get her back in and talk for a few minutes.

Well, I got my computer on the wireless network here, so I should be able to work on finishing my presentation. Pray for me--I still need a focus to help me sort through and organize all the information that I have! My presentation is Thursday at 1:45.

Off to shower and bed! My day is scheduled for tomorrow--Preconference 8:30-11:30 AM, lunch 11:30-1:00, second Preconference 1:15-4:15, presenters meeting 4:30-5:00, mentor/mentee meeting 5:00, welcome dinner 5:30-6:30, reception @ Josiah Quincy House 7:00-8:30.