National YSA conference 2011 Monday Morning " They think it's all over"

Morning seemed to come quickly, all too quickly as a matter of fact as I was woken up by the crashing of doors as some of the committee members on the corridor left to go a meeting. A very early meeting mind you.

I did try to get back to sleep but failed miserably, before decided that any further attempts would prove either pointless or probably result in me sleeping through breakfast and checkout time.

But low on sugar and caffeine how was I going to fully wake myself and rejoin the land of the living and awake. Yes there was only one thing for it, a very cold shower! Which I endured with my most impressive manliness possible.

And for that read a depressingly girlish shriek.

Going across to breakfast I discovered we finally had breakfast.... but that was it as the only other choices were scrambled egg which I don’t like and tomatoes which I really, really don’t like especially when you see what looks like 2 dozens industrials tins worth of tinned tomatoes floating in a giant metal dish.

Battling tiredness, I decided that the best thing to do would be to keep moving and start packing the car up right away because to go and lie down again would probably be a fatal mistake. Mind you I reset my alarm on my phone just in case I did make that mistake ( hey sometimes I can actually not be brain dead stupid!).

Which was promptly disproved by my struggles to get all of my stuff back in the case, with a few moans and curses wondering what the problem was as everything had fitted in there on Friday and it was not like I had added anything. Or maybe I was just fulfilling the male stereotype of being unable to pack properly.

Still I somehow managed to get it all packed ( if not especially well it was still in the case darn it!), but even after loading the car up I still found I had ages of time before I had to give my keys in, let alone be at the conference centre.
Although I wondered if the possibility of cheerfully throttling two 18 years old who had skipped past me at breakfast happily boasting that they had only had one hour of sleep and felt fine, I decided that the stake president would probably frown on that. I decided to basically put some music on and dance around like a complete loon (in my room of course.)

Okay maybe not the most constructive use of time but at the time in my sleep deprived state it seemed like a good idea okay?

Arriving at the conference centre I found YSA rather thin on the ground which was not surprising as it was Monday morning after all. Phoenix and the gang all seemed to be mia so I was left to sit with only person I could see who I knew. The stake president! I did feel a little bit like the kid who has to sit with the teacher.

Anyway it was the talent show first and I was determined to make good use of my new toy and it’s shiny zoom lens to get some good pictures for once as in previous years I’ve been so far from the stage most pictures had people coming out very, very small.

Phoenix and gang finally appeared a little time after the start of the show and I quickly relocated back to join them. There were some very good acts in the talent show, asides from a magic act that quite frankly we totally couldn’t follow but we soon realised there was a problem as there were too many acts. People started to get bored especially as we started to close in on the supposed end time of the conference and we still had two more things to go.

Still that aside I was having a great time running back and forth taking photos, singing along to the songs, complete with bad air guitaring when somebody sang a bon jovi song and even letting phoenix take some pictures of me with my camera. Which I still think was her most impressive feat all weekend. Not only getting me in front of a camera but getting me to agree to it willingly!

My inner mental voice even put in a belated appearance at one point asking me what I was doing, as I didn’t do things like this, singing willing? Air guitaring? I don’t do things like this. No, I decided firmly silencing that voice, but I did and maybe that was the most important thing I could have learned all weekend. I was starting to find myself again.

Finally the talent show came to an end, just in time for the Disney interactive choir to start. Phoenix by this time had started to guard the main door in a effort to stop ysa raiding the lunches that had been put out rather early and so inevitably with a lot of tired and bored ysa people had started to take them.

The choir was good, very good in fact as they had spent large chunks of the weekend practising , unfortunately a lot of people at the back where we were didn’t appreciate this and were talking. A lot, especially a lot of lads who were cool coz they wore hats and Talk Street so people could get they were cool coz people could get it.

These Muppets I could have cheerfully strangled too if anyone was wondering.
Once the choir had finished it was time for the karaoke, which even my enthusiasm was lagged for as we were well past the original end point of the conference by this point and I was started to wish for things to come to a end as it was getting increasingly hard to focus in my fatigue addled state.

The karaoke was the classic boys versus Girls. The girls got Katy Perry’s Firework and the lads. Well we didn’t get a great song as we ended up with Bruno Mars which wasn’t the best. Which then wasn’t helped by said group of muppets from earlier and some other lads starting to loudly bellow ( not sing mind you) something else. Which lead to the girls in the audience starting to chant off, off and one half of the boys who were singing properely to start booing the other side of the lads. My backup photographer Phoenix got a great picture of this mind you.

Finally it was time for the Video of the weekend. Now I was still expecting only one or two photos of mine to be featured as I was sure they had got much better photos from other people.

Errrhhhh no.

After six of my photos appeared in rapid succession, I had a serious case of” Wait, what the heck is going on here?” as more and more started to appear I realised that in fact they had used almost all of the photos I had turned in leaving me considerably gob smacked. Overall I think at least 90% of the photos they used were mine.

And then suddenly that was it. The conference was over with the same suddenness I had learned all too well.

The last ever national YSA conference was over and my last sixth and final conference had drawn to a close.