Twenty one.

Well, here I am back in Bend, Oregon after a nice weekend of not being in las vegas at a convention. The whole trip to Vegas was sort of a blur, basically worked the whole time and slept the other time. We did get done at about 4:00 on Thursday, and had a nice dinner at the NY NY hotel. I was surprised at the will of some of my co-workers to 'hit the strip and gamble' after 2.5 long days of convention work with very little sleep. But then after thinking about it, most of them have children, and when they are away from home they have to take advantage. I was perfectly content with going up to the hotel room to sleep. But I did manage to hit a few slot machines.

I put 5 bucks in a nickel slot, pulled the lever, and BAM 48 bucks. Cash out, after one spin. Then I went over to the deal or no deal slots and within about a minute i was up 8 bucks. So, I wasted the rest of the 8 bucks and change, and stormed out of there with almost 45 dollars more than I came in with! Hot damn. If everyone could say that when they left vegas it wouldn't be vegas! I had some temptations to play some 21 (three card poker), but the minimum was $10 per hand, and I figured if I played 4 hands, and lost all four, I'd be down, or where I started, and depressed that I just lost all that money. Even though it wasn't that much... One of the wives of my co-workers won a Grand. sweet.

Latest news on the iron overload front is I'm officially 100% de ironed, with no phlebotomies in sight. I stopped going in for weekly phlebs at the end of February, when my ferritin was 30. A month after that (at the beginning of April), my ferritin went up 5 points, so I had another phleb. Today my Ferritin tested out at TWENTY ONE. That was the best news I could have hoped for. Now it's time for some steak!!!!!

Parting shots from Las Vegas:

Convention before:


Convention during:


The strip, as seen from the walkway between MGM and NYNY:


Statue of Liberty, NY NY hotel:


We actually did make it down here on the last day (view from Bellagio entrance):


I was still smiling after the chaos.


With this post a new format is also being rolled out, to accommodate larger photos. Thanks Blogger, for making this easy.

Arb0nne N.T.C. 2007, Las Vegas

What am I doing here? How did I get here? When can I go home?

I'll just start from the beginning. I signed up to help out at the convention, as the 'IT geek'. Merrill (company I work for) does -alot- of printing work for Arbonne. It was a trip to Vegas and hey, what the hell, why not. Can't be that bad.

Left Bend @ 4:15pm tuesday, when I thought my plane left at 4:45pm. Needless to say, the gal at the ticket counter basically said, if I'd have been one minute later, they may have not let me board.

The airport in Vegas. Notice, there are very few signs that say "to Baggage Claim". They want you to gamble at the airport.

Got to NY NY Hotel at about 9:50pm, call Stephanie (the project manager for this task, think NBC TV show apprentice). the task: sell as much arbonne stuff as possible in 2 days. Go to MGM grand garden arena to help setup the computers. La la la, that happens, and when it's all said and done, it's about 1am, off to bed ASAFP. Slept horribly.

Next morning wake up call at 5:30, in hopes to find breakfast, before going to the convention to begin selling crap. Best I could find with the time frame given: 2 Starbucks scones and a coffee. Yippie skippy.

Arbonne doors open up at 7:30am. we had 2 stations, with 4 registers (read: laptops running a db program) each, and by 7:45am, both areas had lines until about 4pm. That whole time I was running a laptop that was acting as a cash register with one 15 minute break. I'm not really complaining but it was extremly busy, overall it wasn't too bad, everyone was nice, nobody was mean, and there were no computer melt downs (whew). out of the what seemed like five thousand people that came through my spot there were literally 3 men. (there are some 16500 people here, 99% women). yea.

We also had drop boxes where people could drop off an order for pick up tomorrow. We got WAY more of those than we expected. We were assembling those until about 11pm.

Photo inserted 4/30/2007
Here's what the scene looked like at 9:34pm:

If this get's pulled off tomorrow (it will), it'll be a work of art from Stephanie. It seemed like we were in way over our heads at times today, and would never get done. now all we have to do tomorrow is alphabetize ten thousand bags for pickup. How long will that take if we start at 6:30am. If big races (like the Birkie, or Twin cities marathon) can do this for participants post race bags, we should be able too...? right? we'll see...

4/30/2007 update: We did get them mostly alphabetized. Except somehow the S and T piles got overlooked, and there was madness trying to get those alphabetized while people were trying to pick up their stuff.

Anyway, this blog post was way too long for how late it is, and how tired I am. But my blog has been lame lately, and I needed to spark it up a bit.

One more full day in viva LV, and then back to Bend on Friday. Big races coming up.

Photos added on flickr, may be inserted into this blog post at a later date.

Wild vs Ducks: hockey live

http://www.comcast.net/sports/nhl/hockeylive/

4/19/07, 7:30pm pacific daylight time

found link on versus.com

Go Green.

In case you don't know who this guy is, he wrote the book The World is Flat. The United States is going to look pretty silly in a few years, when we look back at and wonder how we made this a political issue.

Round 1

NHL Playoffs, Round 1

East:
Sabers vs Islanders: Islanders in 7, because they have Richard Park.
Devils vs Lightning: New Jersey in 6, because Tampa Bay doesn't belong.
Thrashers vs Rangers: Rangers in 6, because Atlanta doesn't belong.
Pens vs Sens: Pittsburg in 5, because Sidney Crosby is the next Great one.

West:
Detroit vs. Flames: Wings in 7, because I want see Derek Boogaard (w/ MN Wild) beat up Bertuzzi in Round 2.
Canucks vs Dallas: Vancouver in 5, because I hate the Dallas Stars.
Sharks vs Nashville: Sharks in 6, because they are Pacific Time.
Wild vs Ducks: the State of Hockey in 6 games.

What a great NHL hockey mind. We'll see.