This week at the mentoring conference - day one

This week, the posts will be a little different. I'm going to blog (and tweet if I can get my ipad back up and running) as I attend ...and present... at the UNM Mentoring Institute's 2012 Mentoring Conference.

Day One

Got everything into a carry on - I'm paranoid the airline will lose my luggage on the transfers and I'll be stuck presenting in jeans and a sweatshirt :-)  I decided to forgo real shoes in case my ankle swelled with the traveling so I'm still in the bright red sneakers I've been wearing since the walking cast came off. My cat refused to "speak" to me all last night onece she saw the suitcase. My kid slept on the couch so he wouldn't miss saying "bye" at 4:30 am when the car came to get me.

I have been having complete attacks of self-doubt around presenting. I've never attended this conference and here I am with 3 papers. Of course, the outcome either way probably won't resonate back to my life up north but, being an overachiever, I still want to knock their socks off.

The last leg of the flight - in the last hour - saw my face pressed to the tiny airplane window. The landscape was light brown, like bloom on dark chocolate. Strange circles of green and tan were scattered below. Some divided like pie slices with greens and some incomplete. It was like a giant had carefully placed confetti. The circles passed away and the ground below resembled frost patterns on a window...but in black. My mind kept trying to make sense of what I was seeing but it simply looked like imprints of 2-dimensional tree shadows on the land. Is that the desert of New Mexico? I had a sudden desire to call my manager and tell her about this... which is when I realised how stressed I must be :-)

My laptop has gone silly on me and I'm trying to recreate my slides in the business centre. Really I want the chair beside me to burst into flames with a disembodied voice saying "They'll like what you have to say"... however, all I hear is the guy next to me complaining about a sales call.

This is what it means to be discombobulated. I hear a glass of wine call my name....