So following Lollapalooza, I got a lil sleep and got ready to head out to the airport. O'Hare was crowded with patrons and bands leaving Lollapalooza. Most flights out on monday were delayed due to a thunderstorm, so I grabbed some food from Panda Express and looked out at the sea of tables in the cafeteria and sighted out the cool kids table... the Lolapalooza table. I wound up sitting with the guys in the band De Sol (very cool / great guys) and I met their publicist, Randy Alexander. I've heard good things about Randy and it was nice to put a face with the name!
We went around trying to find a wireless internet connection. We found one outside of the Admiral's Club. You have to sit on the floor right outside the entrance and cross your fingers that the connection is going to work. After trying to log in for 15 minutes we gave up and parted ways.
I'm heading off to McLane's 7-11 show in Miami for a couple of days. I'm trying to get more candy into their stores. If I can do this successfully, maybe I can get an assistant to do all the mundane data entry I've been doing instead of sales and customer support, which I need to be able to focus on to ensure future sales. I decided to check back and see how my flight was doing. It looked like I still had a few hours before there'd be any forward progress. So I started to walk the corridors of O'Hare and ran into my old buddy Nate, who was on his way to the Virgin Islands for work. He'd already missed his connection due to the weather from Minneapolis to O'Hare and he still had O'Hare to Miami, Miami to Puerto Rico and Puerto Rico to the Virgin Islands to look forward to. Anyway, we walked to the ticket counter and got him on my flight which was earlier and I switched seats so we could sit together through the flight.
After our success in changing tickets we hit the airport bar. We grabbed a couple of Jack 'n Cokes and meandered over to the Brookstone store which I like to call the Brookstone Lounge on account that they have very comfortable lounge chairs that not only let you kick your feet up, but also give you a massage.
The trip was noneventful, and great. I met a couple of people on the shuttle to the Fontenbleu Resort who were in Miami for an EPA conference and one beautiful and pretentious girl who was in town to sing. She stated that she went to school with Norah Jones. I went to school with Ron Dayne, but I'm not even remotely a Heisman winning running back. Regardless, I didn't want to get into a conversation about her floundering career. I understand that many people have their sphere of knowledge, but this snooty lil beauty queen didn't know what the EPA was or even after she was told that it was in fact a government agency. Though she does speak much better spanish than I do and has a full working knowledge of Miami, so I was able to grab some restaurant names and clubs that she recommended. I know exactly what I'd find if I went there: dressed up girls, over priced drinks, frat boys in silk shirts and bad house DJs.
I trust Doc Darren, a friend of my friend Suz's and by the transitive property, my friend too. He's a urologist in Miami and is just passing his boards. We went around on Tuesday night. Compared to the midwest, Miami is a bit more on the hot 'n humid side, so I made the mistake of wearing shorts and being comfortable. If I wanted to get into the places lil miss what's her face mentioned I should have worn jeans and dress shoes. Anyway, we found a bunch of cool spots around South Beach 'n Lincoln areas. I guess P Diddy was shooting a video on South Beach. At least I kept hearing about it.
The 7-11 work was good, I worked hard trying to lock down deals, but I'm not sure that the people who were there were really into trying something new, but 172 of them were and it helped bolster sales with 7-11's distributor McLane.
