A weekend in TN

This weekend I went to Cookeville, TN for an IIE (Institute of Industrial Engineers) Conference. It was.... special?

First of all, Cookeville (home of Tennessee Tech University) is about as awesome as it sounds. There are like 3 bars there and they are all sketchy, lame, horrible or some combination of the three. Also, the taxi service appears to be four independently operated businesses with a total of 6 cabs between them.

As for the conference, there were high points and low points which I will expound in list form.

Highs

• Tour of the Jack Daniels Distillery. AwesomeAwesomeAwesome. Yay for Tennessee sipping whiskey. The tour takes you through every step of the process in the actual facilities which all smell like bread, grain alcohol or active yeast. The whole thing was pretty badass. Recommended by Abby,
• Other IE's from other schools. Particular shout-out to the 4 brave souls from Virginia Tech who are completely fabulous and also my heroes for providing transportation in their bitchin' minivan.
• Competitions involving Lego's. The Clemson teams completely dominated the competition that involved building a Lego building for a small, stuffed King Kong to climb. My team built a 27-inch tower in 17 seconds. Plus we got to play with Legos for like an hour.
  
• Surprisingly, the food. Our two fancy-ish dinners were quite tasty.

Lows

• There was no coffee served anywhere at any time. I've given up soda for Lent so I was extremely under-caffeinated.
  
• Going out at night meant that the Clemson-ites were averaging about 3 hours of sleep a night. Grumpiness. Again- no coffee.
  
• The theme of the weekend was leadership, which meant we heard about 87 boring speakers give the same boring speech about how IE's make great leaders.
• We lost the keys to our 12-passenger van and spent much of the trip without transportation for 12 people.
• We were late for absolutely everything, because it is impossible to get 14 hung-over, sleep-deprived, cranky collegiates anywhere in a timely fashion. Particularly if they have no vehicle.
• I broke a nail. Not in the 'oh I'm a girl and I'm sad my nails are uneven' way (though that does make me sad- they were so pretty!) I broke it the in the way that it cracks a half-inch below the skin and after the nail is completely broken it stays attached to the skin and has to be torn off like a band-aid that rips off four layers of skin and hurts so bad you think you'll faint. So after all that, the end of my right thumb looks like it attacked in a knife fight and it still hurts like an obscenity because I keep running it into stuff. I use my right thumb a lot. Like to turn keys and write, and put on jewelry, and tie my shoes, and open doors, and reach into pockets, and button my pants and all of those things are now rather painful experiences.
  

Anyway, I had fun. It was my first conference like that and will probably be my last. I was not aware that the purpose of these things was to go get ragingly drunk and act up doing things you wouldn't normally do. Apparently Vegas rules apply. I found this somewhat annoying, particularly because I'm not repressed and there isn't anything I want to do that I wouldn't do in front of people I know.

All that funnels into me being very grateful that my friends and family love me just the crazy way I am, so I don't have to spend 5 hours in a van full of strangers to get far enough away to let loose.

Love you Blogsters.

Also, Obama is kickin' ass. Yay Barack!!!