I’m totally exhausted.

I’m currently on a business trip in Hotlanta, Georgia at a candy conference. It’s awesome and wonderful and fantastic and I’m so grateful that my company pays for me to see the peach tree headquarters.

But, I’m so exhausted that I want to cry and sleep and take a hot bath all at once.

I originally needed to be here Sunday night, so I could have meetings starting early Monday, but I worked at church until about 8:30 p.m. Sunday night, so I arranged to instead take a flight out of O’Hare at 6 a.m. Monday morning.

That meant I had to wake up at 2:30 a.m. so I could leave for the airport by 3:30 a.m. so I could get there by about 4:15 a.m. so I could get my full body scan before boarding.

This is the picture I took from my glorious window seat. Immediately after, I feel asleep and slept all the way until we started to land and my ears popped like pop corn.

Then, when I got to town, I took a cab to the hotel where they held the conference last time I was here in February. Except, you know, OBVIOUSLY, it was not at that hotel this time. So I walked down two blocks to the RIGHT hotel and luckily they let me check in early as crap.

This is the view from my room. The random circle building looks interesting.

This is the couch in my room. It is full of my stuff. Ignore the underwear. Focus on the Fannie May Mint Meltaways in the yellow box, which I scored in my meeting with Fannie May.

This is my bed. I love hotel beds. And hotel blankets. And hotel pillows.

I also sat at a random table at dinner last night, and randomly Lee Dyer was sitting next to me. He is NFL referee #27, and he even gave me his official NFL card to me to prove it. The only picture I got of him was taken in a sort of stalkerish way, so it’s a little blurry. But here he is. Also, I have his email, so if you see him make any bad pass interference calls next season (assuming there is a season), let me know and I’ll shoot him a note.

To sum up, I’ve been juggling meetings and church business and meetings and networking and meetings and emails from the office and meetings and writing and meetings since I arrived. Fun times.

The first time I ever took a business trip that was more than an hour from my cubicle, my colleague Bronson and I drove from Pierre, S.D. to Sioux Falls, S.D. We covered Sen. Tim Johnson’s first press conference since his brain injury.  I was broke, and Bronson was broke, and my newspaper was broke, so we had to pool all our money for the gas and then, for dinner, we had to eat cold spaghetti out of a Tupperware container while standing by the trunk of my car in a random parking lot because we didn’t even have enough money for Taco Bell.

That sucked.

This is better.

But I’m still totally exhausted.