Colorado Business Educators Conference. Day One.

Hi. It is Saturday evening, just after dinner. I got back this afternoon at about 3:30 p.m. from my day and a half trip to Denver for the Colorado Business Educators Conference, held at the Renaissance Hotel near the old Stapleton Airport. If I haven't mentioned previously, our attendance at this conference was optional, but yielded 50 extra credit points for our Business Methods course. I need the points for an A, so there I was.

We left at 8:00 a.m. on Friday morning, Robert, Lynn and me. As there was a reported accident on I-25 backing up traffic for miles, we jumped on US34 heading East to Greeley, then got on US85 heading South. This added abit to our drive, but we arrived by 10:00 a.m., with plenty of time for checkin at the hotel and for the conference. The hotel room was nice, with two queen sized beds. Lynn had one room and Robert and I had the adjoining room. There was a door inbetween the rooms, usually open.

We met up with Tim, the fourth Project Promise Business member in the lobby. He had driven down with Rebecca, a member of our Methods class. Emily, Rob and Chris also attended. Tim and Chris and Rebecca were to stay in our rooms with us. It made for a cozy arrangement.

We checked in and went to our first seminar of the conference. This was our Methods instructor, Dr. Teresa Yohon, giving a talk regarding the revamping of Business Standards for the state. Not much we hadn't heard before. We then got together as a group and went across the street for lunch at a Panera's restaurant. In the afternoon, we went to a couple other presentations. Apparently, most of the seminars are simply given by teachers in the organization, using simple PowerPoint slides. Nothing very innovative or exciting, that I could see.

In the evening, we had a fairly good "chicken or fish" dinner. We managed to meet some of the other attendees, mostly business teachers from around the state. Predominantly, the folks were from smaller and rural areas, such as Delta, Burlington, Holyoke, etc.

As the meal wrapped up, the keynote speaker took the mike. He was a lobbyist for the IFBE, a small business lobbying organization. He spoke for almost an hour. He had a couple of cute anecdotes, but his speeck was, on the whole, terrible. It had no point or focus and consisted mostly of a slew of statistics without visual supports. We all thought it was a waste of time.

After the speech, awards and door prizes were given out. Tim, from our cohort, was the second winner of a door prize. As he went up to the table to select his prize, there was a large basket with a stack of business books, some stuffed animals and a "Flash drive" perched on the top. Flash drives are cool little plug-in accessories that go into a computer's USB port to provide portable disk storage. At the cheapest, they run 50-100 bucks. Tim passed this basket up for a smaller gift bag. When he got back to the table he opened it, exposing a jar of jelly. We thought this was extremely funny and gave Tim a hard time about it for the rest of the weekend.

Later in the evening, our Methods instructor, Dr. Yohon, won the "Colorado Post-Secondary Business Educator of the Year" award. Kind of neat, I suppose. She seemed very pleased.

The "banquet" did not let up until 9:15 p.m. We then ran back to our rooms to make plans. The "kids": Rebecca, Tim and Chris, were interested in going out. Tim knew of a high school reunion going on in Boulder, so they took off at about 10:00 to drive for 30 minutes to go to a party of some sort.

Us older folks, Robert, Lynn and myself, decided to watch a Pay-Per-View movie. After about an hour of decisions making, we finally decided on "Mystic River." See a description here. Overall, the acting in the movie was pretty good, but the movie was pretty bleak and depressing and I spent most of the second two-thirds of the movie waiting for one of the main characters to get killed unjustifiably. This happened at about 12:52 a.m.

We finally got to sleep at about 1:00 a.m. Tim, Rebecca and Chris got in at about 2:30. Rebecca apparently has more energy than common sense and with a couple of drinks under her belt, she set about waking up everyone by laughing and pillowfighting. It was pretty annoying, but I guess it could have been worse.

It must be nice to be 21 years old without a care in the world.