I’ve been off on an adventure. I went to Nashville for a week for a conference and then came home via Chicago (which is totally out of the way) in order to go to a concert.

I went to the conference with 2 coworkers. One had never really traveled without her boyfriend before and had been very nervous in the months leading up to the trip. She had a good time though. The other one has a sister who is very pregnant so they drove separately from me so if she needed to go home early she could. They ended up getting to stay the whole time. We had a free day before the conference started. We went to see the movie of Six. I was the only one who had seen the show before so that was fun.

On the first day of the conference the one coworker was super grumpy. I ended up keeping a list of her complaints that first day.

  • It was too hot – It was 100 degrees. That was hot.
  • It was too cold
  • There are too many people at the conference
  • We weren’t allowed to sit on the floor
  • We got a free fancy totebag and not backpacks
  • We didn’t get a notebook and pen in the inadequate bag
  • The hotel didn’t have a big enough sign
  • Bouquets die
  • Despite going over the schedule repeatedly, she ate all her snacks early and had to wait 1 hour while hungry before a free food party. (I ended up feeding her my food to shut her up. Guess who then couldn’t eat at the free food party because they didn’t have vegan food? Me)
  • The free food party was a waste of her time. Unsure why on this one because she liked the food and free gifts.
  • We didn’t have a set meeting time and place for when the lectures would be finished in 2 hours.

I told her that she was the most negative person ever. Later we also had to have a conversation about how people were allowed to like different things. This was about whether you eat pasta with a spoon or fork.

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That’s my bouquet from the free food party. You got to pick five stems and then they’d add greens and make it pretty. It lasted all week.

Here’s things I think you only see at vet conferences:

It was a little petting zoo. You could go in and brush them. I was impressed that someone had made a business making other people groom their animals. There was also cat and dog cafes. I didn’t go in any of them.

We got loads of free stuff and lots of hours of CE in.

I figured out that I’m not a Nashville fan. It seems like a really soulless and dead city in the downtown area. I only saw one person walking his dogs. There were no joggers. There wasn’t any landscaping outside of parks. No one seemed to live there. The contrast with Chicago a few days later was stark. There were people and dogs and everyone had landscaped.

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It’s Monday!

Indiana Dunes National Park – warning – very cute dog pictures