Last Night and Today

Today's plan: Go to work with the OITP folks, which I'm thinking won't go past 2p.m. or so. Then I plan to come back up to the Loop shopping area and hit the pavement; I saw a Filene's Basement yesterday and who can resist a look? And then... from 5-9 p.m. today the Art Institute is free, so I could pop in there and enjoy some refreshing works of art, maybe pretend I'm an extra in the Ferris Bueller movie.

Last night was fantastic. After some treacherous waiting/trying to meet with people/etc., I managed to meet up with one of the other girls going to the show, Kathy S. (So many Kathys in my life all of a sudden). I am super-glad we found each other; not only did it make the whole experience more fun, but we were able to help each other navigate our way to the Chase Auditorium. It's in the basement of the giant Chase building, just so you know :-). We took the bus from the convention center back to the Loop, without a problem. 

Regarding the student to staff program -- Kathy is working for the Courant, the daily paper of the conference. She is assigned to write about one program for each of the four days she is here. She commented that she is so glad she didn't get stuck in the ALA Store. I didn't even realize that was an option, and YES, I am thrilled I am also not stuck there. Who wants to work retail for 16 hours of the conference? Certainly not me.

My comments about Wait Wait -- I had no idea how much gets edited out of that show every week. The back-and-forth was terrific in some places (especially from you, Paula Poundstone! She is too funny) and there's no way they have the time to keep all that. Peter Sagal said they do re-record some sections at the end of the show (so just sit tight, folks) and they did do that -- cleaning up some sloppy bits and, sadly, re-recording a section where he announced in the telling of the story that they used Wikipedia for research, and all the librarians booed him. That was HILARIOUS, and I'm so sad it won't be on the air! It's definitely worth going to if you're ever in Chicago on a Thursday night. They warmed us up with some librarian jokes, but I'm a little disappointed that the final cut probably will not reflect that the audience was made up of 500 librarians. Oh well. We know the truth. (Of course we do. We're librarians!).

Met the roomie last night when I got back from the show; she is of course very nice. She had to get up early to be able to meet her ALA people at 8 a.m. Terrible. I love that the OITP is allowing me to sleep in. :-)