Week in Review: Fort Worth, TX

Our annual conference always feels like the longest trip of the year and being close to home in Fort Worth didn't change that a bit.

This was a swanky hotel for me.  They even embossed the toilet paper.  When I showed this to David he asked if we could start doing this in our guest bathroom.  Does anyone know where I can buy an embossing tool with an S on it?

I arrived on Sunday and it was over at 11 am on Friday.  I don't think I got to bed before midnight any night I was there and anyone who knows me at all knows this is late.  And then there was this other small matter.  Monday night after training, a colleague and I rounded up a couple of clients to get out for a walk.  I tried to ignore signs that I should stay at - or at least near - the hotel.

I was still trying to ignore and pretend everything was fine when I took this photo of a mural in a park by the Trinity River.

I finally confessed to my colleague I needed to leave the group and walk back as fast as possible.  I got to the Tarrant County Jail and knew I wasn't going to make it.  In desperation, went in.  If you ever need to break someone out of jail, fake an illness.  The man at the desk took one look at me and let me right in.

Me and my body have a tenuous relationship.  I have to be very careful about what I eat.  This is one of the few meals I selected for myself this week.

I am supposed to be meeting a group for dinner in about an hour so once I get to the hotel, I take as much medicine as possible. 

Daddy Jack's is a seafood restaurant where the menus are all different drawings by children.  My colleage says, "Remember when we ate here last time?".  I said, "I have never eaten here before."  "YES YOU HAVE!" she gently reminds.  I don't remember it at all and because my great-grandpa went by the name Daddy Jack, it should have stood out to me but it definitely didn't. 

This dinner was bad idea as well.  I wasn't completely over my earlier issues as I realized around the time the bill came.  Luckily the restaurant is only about a block from the hotel. 

I faked feeling well the rest of the week and did the best I could with meals that were almost all decided for me (and everyone else). 

I had plans to stay after our conference ended to take in the Arts Festival again with my artsy friend who also happens to be my sister-in-law.  It wasn't meant to be even if I had been feeling well.

The weather was beautiful all week...until Friday.

I did make it out to the festival Thursday and again on Saturday but never with her, we couldn't get our schedules aligned.

In a 6 degrees of separation moment, it turned out my colleague knew this band, The Fingerprints, who played Thursday at the festival.  Her husband went to school with some of them.  I think Coors might have been a festival sponsor but I could be mistaken.

The best thing that happened all week was my rare one-of-a-kind find at the Arts Festival:

Another small world moment.  I am at a restaurant with a group in Sundance Square where the festival is happening.  My husband sends me a text that our daughter put on Facebook that she is at the festival (don't you love technology?).  I walked over to the restaurant where she was to get my hands on grandbaby #1.  When I went to leave she said, "but I want to go with YOU."  Good thing I didn't take her because I had just eaten so an hour after my friend took this, I was dying again and realizing I was completely out of medicine.

I will be making a trip to the store this week to replenish my traveling medicine cabinet since I am home this week. After that I am off into the world again for back-to-back trips - Omaha and Amarillo.  Hopefully the humiliation I (accurately) predicted will finish wearing off before then because I have big plans for these two exciting destinations.