Awakened by my bleating cell phone at a quarter to seven, I threw on enough clothing to be presentable and shambled down to the dining commons for a hearty breakfast, smug in the thought that the majority of my colleagues, having elected to lodge in a motel instead of the dorms, were choking down a crappy breakfast of cold toast and warm orange juice. After finishing, stepped outside into the fog and watched a small herd of deer nibbling away at the lawn.

With not much sleep under my belt, I struggled to stay awake enough to listen to folks from each UC campus discuss their current IT projects, and saw some awards handed out recognizing cleverness in last year’s endeavors. A much-welcome intermission followed, during which banana-nut muffins of surpassing tastiness was served; went back into the lecture hall wide awake, but was subjected to a rambling discourse about webcasting in higher education given by some young Google hotshot (looking very much the part in jeans, blazer, and a simple dress shirt) with the unlikely name of Obadiah Tarzan Greenberg (!).

Lunch followed: club sandwiches with ample bacon, fruit, and your run-of-the-mill bitter, weedy spring mix with some passable but not quite identifiable dressing of an Italianate bent. Listened with satisfaction as my colleagues described their lackluster breakfast with bitter contempt. Non sequiturs were provided after lunch by groups of Japanese exchange students playing Red Rover and Duck Duck Goose in their strange moon language. Discussed our department’s incident tracking system with some woman from Irvine, at the request of a Davis colleague, and then delved into the seminars. My nose for picking the right seminars was apparently off: the two I’d selected as most applicable to my job and department turned out to be relative clunkers, and the one B-list I attended only because everything else seemed even less relevant turned out to be extremely interesting.

The lack of sleep catching up to me, I forsook the dinner trip to the local boardwalk in favor of the very exciting alternative of passing out in my room. Truth be told, I’d actually been looking forward to indulging in a bit of inertia sans kids, cats, or interruptions of any kind. Took a shower in the lukewarm mist that passes for hot water here and dried off with the 60-grit towels thoughtfully provided by the staff, fabric so rough I looked sunburned after scrubbing my face with one. Flopped into bed and got caught up on Homestar Runner. Just another wild night in a college town with yours truly.