Glamor

So, about my upcoming trips.

I leave early Tuesday morning for a flight to Fort Lauderdale. My meeting is actually in Sunny Isles Beach, FL, which is code for Miami. We're meeting in a nice hotel, but it's a good 15 miles north of South Beach, where many of the movers and shakers among the group wanted to be. Their desire to be in South Beach was made impossible by a series of logistical factors, including but not limited to expense and unavailability of hotels with sufficient meeting space.

I'll have two nights...maybe just one...free. The remainder of my time is rigidly choreographed between board meetings, educational sessions, command-performance social events, and the like. My role calls for someone who's very outgoing, genial, and deeply social; I play the part, but would not get the Oscar.

My favorite part of every day while attending this sort of event is the time in the evening I can get away from the crowds and return to my hotel room. That's usually later than I'd like, and after I've politely declined invitations to go to the area's trendiest bars and hippest nightspots. During my last trip to Miami, I was roped into having drinks at the Delano Hotel. I have to admit it was an interesting experience, but play-acting the jet-setter lifestyle gets very old, very fast.

Fortunately for me, the group of people I'll be with, while very big on partying and being in the midst of the scene, are for the most part intelligent and fun to be around...as fun to be around as any large group of people can be.

The meeting ends next Saturday, late enough that I cannot get a flight back until the next day. And the next day I arrive back in Dallas just two and a half hours before I have to catch another flight, at another airport, to another coastal city, this one in South Texas. Once I arrive there, I scramble to attend the opening night festivities of the conference, spend the next day and a half attending meetings and visiting with colleagues on issues relevant to our businesses, and then zip back home.

Back here, I'll spend the next day preparing for a trade show that begins Thursday in Fort Worth and lasts through Sunday. Standing in a booth for six hours a day, three days in a row, is not good for my feet nor for my back, but I'll live through it.

Somewhere in the midst of all this activity, I have to have some furniture delivered to the house. That, and get a cup of coffee.