According to my calendar, I should be flying to Nashville today. But I’m not. Because the RWA National Conference there was cancelled due to the flooding of the Opryland Hotel, where the conference was being held. Once I learned the conference was cancelled and then the venue later changed to Orlando, I decided not to go to Florida. Orlando is about as far away from B.C. as I can travel within North America. Because I live in a town small enough that it doesn’t have an airport, it takes at least three plane changes to reach Orlando. I know, because I’ve done it (DisneyWorld with the fam).
I should be mourning Nashville, and I am, because I really wanted to go. More for personal reasons than conference, I realized when the venue changed because of the flooding. I might have mentioned before that my parents’ love story revolves around Nashville, even though neither of them are American. Basically, my mother and her older sister were sent to Seventh Day Adventist Academy (private high school) in an area of Nashville known as Madison when my grandmother moved to Ontario for a nursing job with the younger children. 
My father, who’s a few years older than my mother, drove down to Nashville and enrolled in college to be near her. She snuck out at night often to see him, eventually she was caught, and, for lack of a better way to put it, she was kicked out. They drove back to Canada, got married, practiced making my older sister, and then had me. They’ve been married for 53 years now.
The school my mother attended is still in Madison. There’s no mistaking the laundry. She worked in the laundry there in the 1950s. Had I gone to Nashville, I would have tried working in a trip to the school. My mother’s stories of the night the headmistress asked her to choose between my father and the school are now family legend.
Yes, those are my parents in the photo. Aren’t they cute?
Seeing as I’m not going to Nashville, I’m going to do my darnedest to attend the RWA Conference in New York City next June. Meanwhile, while RWA members are enjoying Orlando without me, I’m embroiled in a never-ending battle to finish several outside painting jobs before September (the weather has not been conducive to painting this year—it’s either raining or it’s boiling hot) and finishing revisions on a single title. Whenever I start to mourn not attending National, I consider that if I were going the last two weeks would have been consumed with conference preparations while the first half of August would have been consumed with post-conference recovery. Considering I’m approaching a milestone anniversary in early August, yeah, it’s better that I decided not to go. I would have been exhausted during my own romantic celebration.
How about you? Are you not going to conference and wishing you were? Are you going, but haven’t left yet? Are you there and for some reason are so bored you’re reading my blog instead of networking? (Are you nuts?).
I’m sure several writers are blogging or Facebooking or Twittering about National. I’ll get my fix that way. Guaranteed.