The Smorgasbord of Douglas Bell

Well, I don’t know why I’m saying “Let’s” because I’m going by myself. But yep, Saturday I’ll be going down to Los Angeles and coming back, all on the same day.

Why am I doing this you ask? Well, let’s flashback a bit. As you may or may not know, I volunteer a lot for the PTA and advocate in the area of student involvement, I’m the president/founder of my school’s Peace Club, etc. My parents are teachers, and so about 2 months ago my dad got an e-mail from the California Teachers Association saying that the CTA Peace & Justice Caucus were accepting nominations for their annual Youth Activism award. My mom mentioned it to me, and I shrugged it off, thinking that I haven’t really done much, yadda yadda, and that was the last I heard of that.

Well, it seems that behind my back, my parents got a number of people who I’ve worked with to write letters recommending me for the award, and they sent that in. So, on December 30th, my parents got a phone call, and told me “Hey Douglas, you’re going to Los Angeles!” And I looked at them like they were crazy. Well, it seems that I actually won that award, and on the 27th will be going down to the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles to receive the award at a ceremony at 5 PM. I was in a state of shock for a few days, but I’ve now accepted that I won, except I don’t trust my parents as much anymore.

Unfortunately, education is poorly funded in California, and teachers are poor, so they only had $200 to offer for paying my way down there. So I’m going alone. I will be taking American Airlines, simply because they were the cheapest of the airlines available and the only one who was operating a flight leaving LAX to SFO after 7 PM. I’ll be leaving early in the morning on flight 1558, departing SFO at around 9:25 AM and arriving at LAX around 10:50, catching a Super Shuttle down to the hotel, and then probably hanging out, getting lunch, walk around, who knows. Then after the ceremony, I’m busting right outside to be Super Shuttled back to LAX, then catching flight 7134 leaving at 9:07 PM and arriving back at SFO at 10:30 PM, and that’s my Saturday.

Of course, I’ll have my laptop along, and if I find any wifi and decide to pop online, you may find me. Hard to keep Twitter updated because I have no mobile phone (that really works), but meh, we’ll see. And the camera. Oh yes, that will be along, although I don’t know if I’ll have a lot of pictars to put on Flickr, but we’ll see how I do.

Anyway, that’s my Saturday! Of course, there’s some other fun things going on this weekend on TalkShoe. Tomorrow, I’m interviewing wGEric from phpBB.com on phpBB Weekly, and then Sunday is our LIVE episode of PreviewCast. Stay tuned!