Our newspaper class left early Friday morning for the ILPC convention at UT Austin. The student council had left just the day before with the Ford Expedition and the Chevy Suburban, leaving us with the huge, clumsy, eight-seater school van. It had only one upside to it — there was more room to sprawl yourself out. But on the downside, parking a huge 18-foot van in a tiny Austin parking lot is a challenge for six teenage girls and one teacher. Even more difficult is squeezing that giant into a four story parking garage. I was pretty sure we were going to scrape the ceiling if not get our entire top knocked off but, luckily, we made it and got to our sessions on time.

On Saturday, we went to four different seminars and I was able to stay awake through them all. It helped a lot when you had a lively and funny speaker. But when Sunday morning came and I was in a college presentation room at 9 a.m. listening to how to format a storyline, it was equivalent to staying awake in church when the preacher is monotone and dead serious.

We left around 11 that morning and within the hour all six of us were asleep. We didn’t return to Bullard empty handed though. While we were there, our school newspaper was rated and we received the Award of Distinguished Merit, the highest of the three ratings. Several of us also won individual achievement awards.

Then that night, I got a call from our adviser at 9:45 p.m. informing me that in the midst of the busy weekend I had forgotten that I had a column due Monday morning for the Bullard Banner. I probably should have been paying attention when the speakers were talking about timeliness.