Time to cel­e­brate!  I’m going to BlogHer ’09.  I have been dream­ing and wish­ing for a chance to go for sev­eral months now.  This year, it will be held in Chicago, IL.  Although it’s not quite next door to me, it’s about as close as most major events get when you live an hour from the Cana­dian bor­der in North Dakota. 

Even more excit­ing, is that I will have a chance to vol­un­teer at BlogHer.  I will be a micro­phone wran­gler.  I’m sooooooooooo excited!  In Octo­ber of last year, I attended a con­fer­ence in Texas, and dur­ing most of the con­fer­ence, I was as busy watch­ing the cam­era men, the light­ing peo­ple, and the other peo­ple run­ning around with head­sets on that I may have missed a few good points.  Whoops!

This year’s theme for the con­fer­ence is “In Real Life.” I am look­ing for­ward to this for a few rea­sons.  One is that I love some of the blogs that I read and I am hop­ing to see/meet some of those blog­gers in real life.  Another rea­son is that I am look­ing for more blogs to read (although one could make an argu­ment against this based on my 700 unread posts in my Google Reader right now), and it’s always fun to read a blog of some­one you know in real life.  Finally, I’m try­ing to fig­ure out how to get to know more peo­ple in the blog­ging com­mu­nity.  Some of my friends blog, but most of them do family/kid/picture blogs.  My blog is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent in that I tend to edi­to­ri­al­ize on top­ics rather than  report­ing what we did or show­ing pic­tures from a fam­ily gath­er­ing.  I am hop­ing to learn a thing or two about this at the conference.

Are any of you going to BlogHer?  Do any of you have any expe­ri­ence or knowl­edge about down­town Chicago?  If so, I’d love to hear from you.  I’m look­ing for a room­mate for the con­fer­ence and some leads for some­where to stay the night before and after the conference.