Well, the first event of the new year was a doozy! I flew out to San Jose on Thursday with my husband Jeff and my co-author on For Young Women Only, Lisa Rice, to tape three telecast programs for Church Community Network, or CCN, and a few dozen behind-the-scenes segments about the research and writing of each of the three books, FWO, FMO and FYWO. Each of the three programs was an hour long in front of a studio audience, and each of the behind-the-scenes segments was three to five minutes long, so as you can imagine, by the end of the day I was totally, completely fried!
The programs themselves, however, I think will end up being really valuable. They’ll be telecast from CCN to remote locations around the country on three different occasions in the summer and fall, starting in June, I think. It’s a lot of work to prepare for a CCN recording, because it requires creating all-new Power-Point slides and bringing in video clips we developed for the new FYWO presentation of guys on the street, sharing their thoughts, but because CCN reaches so many churches that might otherwise never have the opportunity to bring in a speaker, its totally worth it. A great chance to talk to a lot of people at once, which I’ve come to realize is incredibly important, given my need to slow down on the number of events that I do each year. I did 50 last year and that was way too much; way too much time on the road, away from my kids and family and friends!
That said, the fatigue of Friday was quite a bit offset by the fact that CCN put us up in a beautiful, luxurious hotel in the coolest area of San Jose. When you’re working so hard, wow, its nice to have great service and a little bit of pampering.
Lisa and I were originally hoping that we could get in some shopping on San Jose’s equivalent of Rodeo Drive. Well, um, correction: WINDOW shopping, since we couldn’t afford any of the beautiful items in the stores! But Friday was packed from breakfast until we all fell exhausted into our beds that night, so we thought shopping wasn’t in the cards. We got up early Saturday morning, turned in the rental car at the airport - and learned that all flights had been cancelled due to the ice storm in Dallas, where we had to connect. We were extremely grateful for our very accomodating hotel, which allowed us to check BACK in to the hotel an hour later (I didn’t know you were allowed to do that!), and have coffee and pass another 5 or 6 hours before returning to the airport and beginning a long odyssey home. Jeff was delighted to have a chance to AVOID window shopping, but Lisa and I jumped right in and had a great time oohing and ahing at all the stores! We actually did each buy a set of jewelry for ourselves at steep discounts, and were very happy.
The rest of the day was part of the ‘adventure’ as we hurry-up-and-waited for flights with extremely thin margins, and actually had to literally run from one end of the Dallas airport to the other in order to catch our flight to Atlanta with a 12 minute connection. Don’t EVER try to do that in Dallas - I’m convinced that is the longest airport in the country. As we pelted up to the gate, breathless, the last to board, pulling our bags behind us, we joked (eventually) about the glamorous life of authors these days. Ironically, when they closed the boarding door behind us, and we pulled back from the gate, we ended up sitting on the tarmac for a whole hour while we waited for de-icing that had just been ordered for all planes.
Thankfully, we actually arrived in Atlanta around midnight (we’d been worried it would be 3:00 a.m., or would even mean spending the night in the Dallas or San Jose airports and leaving the next morning due to all the cancellations), and got to bed around 1:30 a.m.. And then it took us about two days to recover!
As I write this blog entry, just a few days later, I’m supposed to be heading out of town to Las Vegas for an event tomorrow. against the same ice storm, which has been moving east and is supposed to be hitting Atlanta during the wee hours of this morning. Gotta love the uncertainty of the weather. but it always serves as a great reminder that WE are not in control!