Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I have this insidious fear that if I don't chronicle what I did in Austin, I will forget (never mind the pictures - my batteries kept crapping out and I didn't take nearly as many as I would have liked). Please let me know if I've gotten anything wrong, as I am having a really hard time remembering the chronology of events. I will add to this as it comes to me.

Friday:
Arrived as scheduled, was allowed to check into my room even though it wasn't in my name. It's amazing what you can do with a credit card. Went to dinner with Bryan, Lyn and M-D, and then proceeded to Break Bread Beer with Brad at the Ginger Man. Met up with lots more people there. I quit early, went to bed (see post about getting only 3 hours of sleep the night before).

Saturday:
To panel or not to panel, that was the question. We managed to make it to breakfast before they closed the doors at 10, then headed over to Kick! Good thing I had checked the weather, since it was HOT and SUNNY and we didn't want a repeat of 2002's sunburn debacle. MJ, Katie, Leia and I went from professional cheerleaders to professional hecklers in no time, finding it much more fun to come up with geeky put-downs than anything else.

We had lunch at Serranos. Very very good restaurant, with a very sweet outdoor patio. And then, since this is the Year of the Sheep and I basically did what everyone else was doing, I went to some panels: the Blogs and Blockades panel was very interesting. I had no idea the restrictions put on bloggers in China, nor how strong the online community is in Iran. Then I headed over to the Explodingdog panel, which was really just a review of the guy's professional life. We left when he started drawing. Dinner was at PF Chang's Guerreros El Sol Y La Luna, followed by Paradise (the New Omni).

This night ended at Senor Dan's Sweet Suite at the Hilton, as it did every subsequent night.

Sunday:
Again, up barely in time for breakfast. I think I went to breakfast again later on with Ruaraidh, Tina, Roger and Connie. I felt a lot better after the second breakfast (yay IHOP!). I then met up with everyone to go to see the Malcolm Gladwell keynote, which I found very entertaining. Katie and Leia and I had a yearning for ice cream, but they opted for naps instead, so I roamed the streets till I found a corner store where I satisfied my craving with a Crunch ice cream bar. Not nearly as good as Amy's, I'm sure, but I was told that was too far to walk, so I stayed close.

Got back to the hotel in time to change and meet up with everyone for dinner at Mekong River, where the appetizers are so-so, but the dinners are pretty good. Then we headed over to the Red Eyed Fly for Fray Cafe 5, where the theme turned out to be goats and shotguns and straws up noses. It was great fun.

I think we went to Paradise again, followed by Dan's Sweet Suite. Got to bed at 3:45 that evening, a whole 15 minutes earlier than the evening before.

Monday:
I grabbed a bagel and a sip of milk before heading over to Dinah's panel this morning, How to make haste slowly. One of the better panels, as usual. She's a great moderator and her panelists are always smart and good speakers. And they allow for questions at the end. Then we waited around for the Bloggies, where hearty a**fucks, bashing Ernie (good-naturedly, of course) and a winning Dooce were the themes.

We spent the rest of the conference wondering where the women of web design were hiding themselves.

We skipped dinner altogether and headed over to 20x2, where the question was What's the Word?. Always fun to see what people can come up with for a two-minute presentation. After a bit of socializing, we headed over to The Bitter End, at which point I realized I had left my credit card at Tambaleo.

Finished the evening at Paradise and DSS.

Tuesday:

Missed breakfast altogether. Slept in a little, then packed up, as we had to check out of the room that day. Had lunch at W3 (wings place) and then headed over for the final keynote, Alex Steffen and Bruce Sterling. I'm still not quite sure what the fuss was all about, but I haven't read any of their books, so perhaps that's why I'm lost. But I have been thinking a lot about how to use less stuff.

Christine, Katie, Amanda and Leia and I then headed over to Tesoros, where I spent money I didn't have and we all got finger puppets. Afterward, Esin let us dress in her room (no hotel room of our own, remember?), and we all found rides to Kevin's Big Dinner (50+ people and really rare steak!!) and Bruce Sterling's Party (free beer! mirror shots! stupid back porch club!) and Ben Brown's House (sorry, Ben, didn't realize we hadn't been invited). Finished the evening off at Katz's Deli (no fries with my grilled cheese sandwich? wtf?) and then (predictably) DSS, where we were priviledged to watch the Kevin "I can perfectly imitate my Jewish aunt" Smokler/ Min Jung "I can channel my father like no one else" Kim stereotype match. I hope we get a repeat at future parties.

By this point, I realized that my flight took off at 9 a.m., and it was already 4, so why sleep? I'd only feel worse when I tried to wake up and get to the airport. So I just stayed up. This was a good plan, till about 5:30, when my eyes crossed and I couldn't seem to straighten them out. I kept falling asleep. I felt narcoleptic. I think I may have said or did some things that weren't appropriate, but I'm hoping those affected will understand and love me for the super person I am (right?).

I arrived home at about 4 p.m. on Wednesday in the same clothes I donned at about the same time the day before.

And that was SXSWi 2005, where we partied like rock stars and made friends we'll have for years to come (and we can stay with when we travel!). Like summer camp, but without the inhibitions.