ICON Cameo

Yesterday Hil and I decided to head on over to Indy to catch a baseball game. It just so happened that International Convention was going on in that city, at that very moment. Wow! Who knew?

There was much talk about the lack of quality candidates, but there were several that were impressive. Amy was the first person I saw when I got there. President Rupert was the first person to see me — he ignored me, which is probably good. Wouldn’t want to run the risk of responding in any way to the emails that I’ve sent over the past several months.

I got to see my club people, which was cool. Anna was adorable when she walked into the lobby of the hotel and saw me standing there… she went from confusion to bewilderment to excitement in about two seconds. Rachel got third place in oratorical. The club got third place in K-Family.

It was about the time that I had finished chatting with my club that Carrie saw me in the lobby and quickly dashed into the gift shop. We found the PA folks and took pictures of their group by the fountain with roughly 300 different cameras. We started walking over to the baseball game with them (Wow! CKI was going to the game too!) but got distracted several times along the way. Strangely, most of my conversations for the first few hours started with “What are you doing here!?” or some variant.

As we were hunting for tickets to the sold out game, I ran into Jean, Womando, and John from GA. Jean had her “Free Pete” button… which was funny. The game was sold out, sadly, but Morgan worked some connections and found us a district with some spare tickets. We ate, chatted with folks, and so on. I got to talk to Pic, Tara, K’lynn, Bobby, Sean, and a host of others before ominous looking clouds gathered and everyone at the game was herded, like sheep, under the stands. It then proceeded to rain like crazy. Overheard as we were all packed together like sardines were the following conversations (not CKI folks):

Random Daughter: Mommmm… I have to peeeeee… I can go to the bathroom?
Daughter’s Mom: noticing that there’s no conceivable way to get to the restroom No dear, you’ll have to wait until the rain stops.
Random Daughter: But I can’t hold it!
Daughter’s Mom: Well, then just go in your pants… nobody will know the difference!

Random Man: Are your daughters twins?
Random Mom: No, they’re 18 months apart! Both of them are “surprises”, but this one was more of a surprise than the other.

We headed back to the hotel early, trying to dry off, and stopped in the convention center where we ran into a horde of Key Club folks (KCI was just getting out of a session). My Bro filled me in that he had gotten some obscene number of girls to “Kiss Him! He’s Irish!” Also ran into Bob Hall, Caitlin, some KC Advisors from back in the day, my Alabama Key Club Folks (Thomas, Finis, Sydney, Haley, etc, etc, etc…), Amanda, Aubrey (AKA “Katie Holmes”), Kyle, Shane Miller, and about a thousand other people. Mike Downs was the only member of KI staff to acknowledge my presence… although I didn’t see many others.

After all that business we made it back to the Hotels and Hil, Morgan, Sarah, Cathy, Ron Nolte, and I sat around in a room ate pizza, drank diet coke, and talked shop for an hour or so before we decided we ought head back to Illinois.

I didn’t get to see everyone I wanted to, but I got to see a lot of people, so that was good. As far as I know I didn’t cause any trouble unless, of course, you count what must’ve been frantic gossiping by some members of the board when they first discovered that I was there. Anyway… more on that business later…