National YSA conference 2011: Sunday morning " tick tock"

One thing I have found out my mobile that I so don’t like is when you use it as a alarm it cheerfully proceeds to give you a countdown to exactly how long it is before said alarm will go off. Which usually is not a problem but when you have got to bed at silly o clock in the morning you don’t need to know in precisely how many hours, minutes and seconds your going to have to drag your sorry butt out of bed.

Suffice to say I got up a lot later then usual, before staggering over to the dining hall for breakfast hoping for Bacon. Which turned out to be a vain hope as not only was there no bacon, there were no beans either! So it just sausages and toast.
It was at this point whilst eating my breakfast and wondering what exactly I had done with my iburoprofen as I had a headache coming on that I was suddenly struck with the realisation that despite helping plan the institute workshops for the previous day I hadn’t attended any of them. If I could have I would have banged my head on the desk at this point but due the building headache I settled for a mildly berating myself and hoping Bro H Would understand.

As I headed across to the conference centre I found myself hoping that Little Em was going to be putting in an appearance as although she hadn’t been at conference for the first part of the weekend, last year she had done the same thing and had turned up on the Sunday. Long term readers will remember her as the person who helped give me a boost when I was on the verge of quitting the 2008 conference ( see here)

and what do you know? My hopes paid off as no prizes
for guessing who was in the conference centre with her usual beaming smile and a welcoming hug. Why Little Em of course!

First up was priesthood, which was a wonderful lesson, really good and it was hard to deny the powerful spirit that seemed to have descended onto the conference at this point. I only had one problem, for the priesthood session we were in the theatre. Which had comfortable seats. Far more comfortable seats that Manchester. Really nice comfortable seats that leaned right back. Really nice comfortable seats that leaned right back and were exactly the kind of things somebody who hadn’t had enough sleep should not be leaning back in.

Suffice to say it wasn’t long before I had my first “ Wait are my eyes open?” moment before realising they weren’t and promptly spent the rest of the session leaning forward in my chair.

So into the main conference session, which I realised with a pang would be my last one ever! I was still mainly glad though that I had dodged having to speak at one of these things. This session was quickly followed by lunch which turned into it’s usual rugby scrum of YSA but I still managed to bag myself some tunafish which cheered me up no end. I even ran into an ( the girl from the previous day) but I only managed a few minute of talking before her friends turned up and spirited her away again. Which did lead me to wonder if maybe the universe was starting to have a joke at my expense.

Still Lunch over I had just enough time to go back to my room and dump my church bag and grab my camera before coming back for the afternoon workshops. I was feeling pretty good if tired. The spirit was so strong and despite usually being quite in control of my emotions I was feeling a little on edge, which could have been down to tiredness, down to the spirit, or the knowledge this was my last conference or maybe all three.

Which made what happened next all the more difficult to cope with.