I hope you’ve had a good weekend and thank you for coming back after our short hiatus from this journal. I had a lot of things to do from a writing perspective (including hitting a book deadline this coming Wednesday) and I just decided to reorganize my head a little bit. So, thank you for understanding.
 
We’re home safe and sound after our Washington/BC road trip and it ended much more uneventfully than the one day in the middle of it, around which we’d planned the entire trip to begin with!
 
It was a week ago Thursday, on May 17th. I was to begin the day’s speeches/panels etc. at the BC Association of Broadcasters’ gathering in beautiful Kelowna, where I’d also had some great visiting time with my sisters and dad. Just perfect, right? Well…it should have been. Today’s journal is a story you’ll want to take in, in its entirety, but it would make for a doubly long audio and written blog. So I’m going to break it into two parts. 
 
After tweaking my “Transformation: When You’re Strong Because You Have No Choice” speech, rehearsing it twice with its 90-some photos and making sure that everything was just so, we went to bed Wednesday, tired but confident. Neither of us could get to sleep right away with so many details going through our heads and a 6:45 am alarm looming, even though we knew what we were doing! The 30-to-45-minute address was all going to go perfectly, just as it had for the Canadian Real Estate Association in Ottawa last month.
 
At 8:00 am, Rob left the room to set up for the technical end of things. I put on my dress, having gotten up early to put in contacts, glue on some lashes and shimmy into my Spanx. 
 
I was to join him at 8:15. But as I left the room I had a quick thought: Gee, it’s weird not carrying my purse or my clipboard or binder, but how nice to have a speech in the hotel we’re staying in!
 
I got to the elevator and just then noticed Rob had texted: “Bring your laptop.” Oh, I thought, that’s strange: he never forgets anything. I went back to the room, retrieved my trusty MacBook Air and got to the solo elevator before it had even arrived. It was that slow.
 
Rob met me in the ballroom and thanked me; he couldn’t believe he didn’t have the computer he needed to follow my speech so he could hit the slides at the right times! Huh. So not like him.
 
As the woman introducing me took to the podium, I walked over to the sound board at the side of the room and said to Rob, “I’m going to need my iPad.” You see, I hold the iPad, use a clip-on lav mic or a headset microphone and, that way, can walk the stage and gesticulate freely. I thought that moving away from the podium was a big step into my public speaking life and I had already done it once with some success.
 
As I asked for the iPad, Rob looked at me like my hair was on fire. (If it had been, I’d have had an excuse to run…) “You don’t have it?” I shook my head. He dashed to his backpack to check; it wasn’t there. A look of panic appeared on his face and quickly spread to mine.
 
“I’ve got to go to the room!” he said, and he was gone. Suddenly, a wave of calm swept over me. Well, this isn’t good, but it will be a challenge.
 

 
At just about the moment he disappeared through the ballroom door, the introduction wrapped up and I heard my name. I made my way to the stage and what happened? I’ll tell you here tomorrow. There are just too many layers to this story to rush through, so – as they used to say – stay tuned!