When you live at 5,000 feet and then you go to sea level, you can drink A LOT and not get drunk!

Read my title. It's not a good thing, actually. It means you spend too much money on drinks.

Anyway, when I came back with money and a drink, our table had filled. There were lots of interesting people. As I talked about my job, I began to feel a bit embarrassed. It seems that other copy editors read 8-12 stories a night and do a really thorough job, but we read 30-50. They asked how we could possibly be doing a good job. I replied that maybe we weren't, but what choice did we have if they didn't let us hire someone? They also made fun of the fact that we still use Xyrite, an ancient DOS-based program that uses "coding." Coding means that instead of clicking on a headline box with your mouse and typing, you have to type all these weird keystroke combinations to tell the computer what font and size and width. It's rather time-consuming, so add that to the fact that we read way too many stories, and you see the difficulties. I am not complaining about my job, I was just surprised at how different it is other places.

Anyway, three of the women at the table invited me to Miami Beach that night. I thought that meant, you know, a beach. I was ready for sand and surf. What it meant was an area with lots of revelers. It was really fun, though, and I bought a really cute dress. My dress comes just past my knees, which was about 3 feet longer than most of the dresses people were wearing in Miami Beach.

We had a drink and some snacks and went back to the hotel to prepare for the next day.

There's only one place on earth where a seminar on diagramming sentences would be standing room only

Day 2, Miami

- Marched downstairs and demanded a new room. Was told there aren't any.
Me: "Nobody's checking out today?"
Her: "Well, other people are coming in."
((Thinking: Uh, I'm already here. Give me a good room and give them my room.))
Her: "Come back around noon and see if there's anything."
Me: "Are you going to put me on a list?"
Her: "No."
Me: "I can't go through another 2 nights of not sleeping."
Her: "Hold on."
((holding on))
Her: "Here you go, room 1126."
((How hard was that?!?))

Then I registered for the conference. This day was probably the hardest because I was so sleepy. Also, I took a class about polls. Sorry, but that's boring. I know it was useful, but it was boring. I took a few great classes, and I was actually most excited about the diagramming sentences class because I just couldn't remember how to do it. The class was packed with enthusiastic grammar freaks. I felt a little inferior when people were talking about predicate transitive nominative gerund modifiers. I mean, seriously, their names for things would go on for that long. And I had no idea what they were talking about. I guess I need to do some grammar studying. It's not too much to expect a copy editor to know these things.

That evening was the cocktail event. I walked in and felt uncomfortable because I didn't know anybody. The last time I went to one of these, I think they didn't have tables, so you had to stand alone or awkwardly force your way into someone's circle. I was relieved to see they had large tables, and it's much easier to join in that way. I saw that most tables were half full. But at one there was a guy all alone. I felt very sorry for him, because as a shy person, I know that easily could have been me. So I joined him and we chatted for a few minutes before I went to go get some money for a drink.

This leads to my next post.

Went to Miami, didn't see no stinkin' sun

I had the privilege of being sent to Miami for the ACES (American Copy Editors Society) conference. This is primarily a group of newspaper copy editors, but also copy editors for private companies and government.

In the interest of not scaring you away with an endlessly long post, I will break it up into several.

This is Day 1:
- Got up way too early. Traveled all day. I left my house at 9 am and got to my hotel almost 12 hours later, although there is a time zone difference.

- Needed to pee, but there was someone else's pee on my toilet seat. I called and asked for someone to clean it and left for dinner. Nobody ever came and I had to call again late at night. I didn't care to sit on someone else's urine -- call me picky.

- Dinner was bad. I had no car, so I had few options. I went to an Italian place at the hotel next door. It seemed pretty authentic, since nobody there spoke English very well. I misunderstood the menu and thought I had ordered a nice filet of tuna with a salad. What I got was a salad with paper think slices of raw-looking cold tuna underneath. The serving was enough for a mouse, but I wasn't that hungry anyway. I hate cold fish or shrimp.

- Went to bed but didn't get to sleep because I was put right next to the elevators and was woken up about 20 times in the night.