Early in the Morning

It's the day before our first speech meet.

I've had a hectic week, trying to keep track of all of the paperwork and hoodies and kiddos and insurance information and kids with questions and angry parents and nice parents and, oh yeah, teaching, too.

This is not an overnight meet, and the school we're going to is about 2.25 hours away, according to MapQuest. Speech meets start at 7:00 am, so the bus is pulling out at 4:45 am. Which means I need to get to the school around 4:15 am. Which means I need wake up at 3:00. A. Freakin'. M.

So. Even though it's not furnished, I am going to spend the night in the lovely condo my parents just bought up here near MTHS. It really is pretty - very foresty and mountainy, and I hope they get to use it to run away from their work once in a while. In the meantime, though, I'm totally going to crash there so I won't have to make the whole commute for these heinously early mornings.

I have an air mattress, a blanket and sheets, towels, and a pillow. Plus, Ben already hauled up his giant LoveSac, so I'll have somewhere to sit tonight, too. I have my laptop and a variety of TV shows on DVD to watch, and I'm going to drive to the closest strip mall (25 minutes away from MTHS) to get some doughnuts for the kids tomorrow, some emergency snacks for the kids who didn't listen to/read my reminders that they should bring snacks since we won't be eating lunch until after the meet and 4:00am-1:00pm is a very long time, and some dinner for myself. Probably Qdoba. They have one of those up here.

And then I'm going to bed. In about 2.5 hours from now. Because if I fall asleep by 7:00pm, that will give me 8 hours of sleep and I'll totally be able to wake up at 3:00 am.

Right?



P.S. I'm writing this blog entry under the same compulsion that I get right before a big trip. There's always kind of an undercurrent of dread - the what if this is my last chance to write something before... I don't know. The plane crashes? The car wrecks? I get kidnapped by gypsies without being near any stairs to confound them?

I'm not really worried about anything tomorrow beyond the early wake-up time. I think it's actually the fact that I'll be away from internet access for a night that is evoking this feeling. Even with my iPhone that I can hunch over and check and recheck my email on the little screen, I feel like I'll be cut off from the world.

Oh well.

P.P.S. SO amazingly glad that it's conference weekend, so I get to sleep in on Sunday without a single dang meeting I have to go to. If only every Sunday after a speech meet was like that.