Today my brain was officially FRIED. Dave and I finished up the trade floor and I finally got myself a Bacon Cone. Yeah, it’s better than it sounds. I swore I wouldn’t leave Austin until I got one, and WOW was it worth it. I love Austin, it’s warm and everything smells like barbecue (at home I swear I am finding myself sniffing the bottles of BBQ sauce in the fridge just for a flashback).
After lunch we found ourselves in the Samsung Bloggers Lounge again (which was AMAZING – you can run into all sorts of great people there, and Pepsi / Pepsi Max donated a perpetually full Samsung fridge full of soda for us all). Realizing that we had been sitting still for almost two hours without any indication that we had the energy to get up from our seats, we called it a show and decided to beat traffic (JOKE!) and head back to San Antonio for the night. Our flight was in/out of San Antonio and Dave had booked us a hotel on the Riverwalk to make the travel easier. Besides, every other conference we had been to has always fizzled out on the last night, who knew that the best parties (TechKaraoke!!) would be then!? (Someone that has attended SxSW in the past, that’s who!)
I didn’t even care at this point if I was going to miss the hottest party since the last hottest party ever at Southby. Did not care. Too tired. I’m glad we bailed and spent some time in detox mode (not from booze, we barely consumed any, needed to detox from the NOISE!). Dave and I have been parents for 9.5 years, married for 10.5 years, and business partners for about 13 years. We N-E-V-E-R get any time to ourselves, so we made some time.
We ate some barbecue, took a ride on the Riverwalk barge ride, and took a stroll along the water. We got to hold hands. We talked about everything we had done, seen and learned over the past week. We talked about our kids. We talked about our business. We realized that we are already doing amazing things with our kids, our business, and ourselves.
And it turned out to be the most perfect reason of all for me to attend SxSW – to realize that what I do matters, and it doesn’t matter if anyone else outside my family and business knows that. I’m okay. Trying to be unique in a sea of 16,000 other unique people didn’t seem like such a big deal anymore.
