A few days ago I received a press pass invitation for SolidWorks World 2009. Ever since, I have been dying to climb a mountain and shout it to the world, but there aren’t any tall enough mountains around this area for the hike to be really worth it and, to make matters worse, I’ve been saddled with a lot of work to do and little errands to run. Why does this have to be such a busy month? Everybody that could possibly get sick will get sick in December and everything that may break or need to be replaced will break or have to be replaced in a hurry, also in December, of course.
I must confess that I had been anxiously hoping and waiting for this invitation for almost a whole year, ever since I found out that several of my fellow SolidWorks bloggers got a press pass for last year’s event. I didn’t want to give it much thought just in case I didn’t get an invitation, but every now and then someone would mention just how awesome SolidWorks World was last year or the year before, someone would publish the pictures or video that they took during the event, someone would make a reference to what was said during one of the sessions, someone else would remember the excitement when the mystery guest showed up or describe everything they saw in the partners pavilion, the robots, the marvelous products designed in SolidWorks… and then my imagination would run wild again, thinking about SWW2009 and just how badly I wanted to attend.
Since I couldn’t be certain that I would be invited just for being a blogger (remember I only started blogging last January), I started hatching my backup plan to get myself into SolidWorks World, and began saving all the leftover money from my weekly budget in my “SWW fund”. That and getting rid of a few things I didn’t really need, and perhaps… OK, with this economy you really can’t raise much money that way, but you got to start somewhere, right? As a matter of fact, I did raise quite a bit of money, although still not nearly enough to cover for the conference and accommodations. So I came up with the backup plan for my backup plan: beg and nag and nag and beg my husband day and night to help me out with the difference until he got so sick and tired of listening to my pleas and my insanity and decided that the best for all of us was to send me far, far away… to Orlando, Florida! OK, I know that’s a lame plan, but what did you expect? After eight long years as a stay at home mother with not much food for your brain and forced to go through endless days of baby talk and little movies with silly stuffed animals and four very grown up Australian blokes singing about cold spaghetti and mashed bananas, most of your brilliant ideas begin to wither and die a painful and very lonely death, and as your brain agonizes, in the background you can still hear the voice of your four year old telling you the same knock-knock joke that makes no sense at all for the hundredth time… and as usual, you are expected to laugh.
OK, that’s too much drama, but seriously, I know it was a lame idea. And it wouldn’t have worked, anyway, because, as usual, Murphy strikes again, and we suddenly had a furnace that needed replacement and wasn’t covered by any insurance, a member of our family that needed complicated (expensive) and extremely urgent oral surgery, and a myriad other repairs around the house that just couldn’t wait. Three thousand dollars here, five hundred there, another six hundred over there… Hmmm… In view of all this and seeing that my search for a flexible job hadn’t been exactly successful, I decided that the best to do was to wait and see what happened and just hope for the best. Hoping for the best was the hard part! Too much Sartre, perhaps…
So, as you can see, I’m really glad and grateful that I got invited to the event this year. Thank you Nancy for including me in the list of lucky ones that gets to go as press! Thank you to the folks at SolidWorks for their kindness and generosity! Now I only wish I could clone myself to attend all the conferences that I’m curious about, even when they take place simultaneously. I’m also excited about the CSWP event. From pictures and stories other people told me about the previous events, I came to think that it was a big party with lots of food, drink, music and pretty girls dancing, but according to the invitation I got by email, this year is going to be really different than previous years, and lots more fun than just a party. There’s going to be a design contest that involves one of those really cool toys in my eight year old son’s Christmas list: the icoaster. He is as excited as I am about the event and the contest, maybe even more. He’s made me promise that if I enter the contest and if I win any toys or anything at all, it will all go to him. Of course… Who do you think owns my SolidWorks baseball cap and the backpack I got at one of the Tri-Valley SWUG meetings?
Anyway, sorry for the rambling! I’m just really excited. I can only imagine how big this event is and all that I will see there! I better pack a pair of extremely comfortable snickers and tons of ibuprofen for my aching joints. I hope to meet a lot of people and bloggers that I’ve only met online so far, like Ricky Jordan, Jeff Mirisola, Rob Rodriguez, Anna Wood, Alex Ruiz, Mark Biasotti (awesome video “Kill Another CAD”) , Charles Culp, and many more. Maybe I’ll also meet some of the people that read this blog there too!
See you in Orlando!
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