In the Ghetto...

I've had a whirlwind of a week or so, and the most blog-worthy event has been my trip to Austin to go to the TCEA Conference. I'm not sure what those letters stand for. All I really know is that it's a technology conference that my principal asked me to go to, and I was more than happy to take the honor and the days off!

Here's Betsy, the teacher who went with me, and I at a reception in Austin.

One of the technologists took apart the flower arrangement and gave us roses. I don't quite have the hang of wearing flowers in my hair... Now I'm a little ahead of myself, so let's start back at the beginning.

I decided to drive my pretty new car to the conference, so we left around noon in the Cap. Betsy had a new TomTom (navigation system thing), and so we decided to use it to get us to Austin (yes, I now know it's 35 South until you run into downtown but I didn't then!). For starters, it took Betsy a l-o-n-g time to get our destination into TomTom. I stopped at McDonalds, got lunch, ate lunch, broke my sunglasses, went to Target, bought new sunglasses, and after all that TomTom decided to agree to go to Austin with us. To be fair, it was new, and so Betsy was still learning how to use it. I offered OnStar, but she really wanted to use her gadget, and to be honest, I wanted to see how it worked.

Skipping ahead to Austin. We knew our hotel was in Austin but not downtown, so when TomTom led us off 35, we were ok. Actually we were ok until we realized we were in South Austin in the ghetto. Not the ghetto like I call the Mall of Irving but the real honest to goodness ghetto. We immediately decided this was not where we were going to stay and started trying to figure out who to call to get permission to use the P-Card (the school's mastercard) for a different hotel. Betsy at one point said something like, "it's getting better, we've got 2 miles to go...we'll be out of the ghetto!" To which I replied (in my highly alarmed Minnie Mouse voice), "We'll still be next door to it!!!" That was about the time when TomTom said, "You've arrived at your destination." Excuse me? We were smack dab in the middle of the ghetto with no hotel in site. For all I knew the houses we were outside were drug dens... yeah, it was not good. OnStar to the rescue! I called OnStar, talked to a real person, and she very nicely led us out of the ghetto and to our hotel. It was a quite nice hotel actually. Right off of 35. Easy to get to. Beautiful. :-) Ah yes... adventure. :-)

The conference was good. I enjoyed the exhibit hall and actually came away with about 5 free t-shirts. One was actually cool - it's a TI "We all use math everyday" shirt that looks like a graphic tee you'd buy on a random fun shirt site. Honestly there's not a lot more to tell. I have no idea how that happened with TomTom, but it was a memory. :-)

I'll try to write more soon.