After a positively HUGE night on Friday night it was an absolute miracle I made it to the conference! After only two and a half hours sleep I somehow managed to wake up and get ready on time. Considering I found my phone dead on the floor when I woke up, it’s amazing I woke up exactly on time…how this happened I will NEVER know as my alarm was set on my dead phone. Weird.

Anyway, as I stumbled around the hotel room trying to make myself presentable I came to realise I was actually still a little bit drunk. Uh oh. I knew this day was going to be tough. A cute hat, a ham and cheese croissant and a BIG cup of coffee later I managed to make my way to ZINC where the conference was being held.

I was greeted by my lovely bloggers checking to see that I was alive and ok – apparently there was some rather drunken late night tweeting that had them a little concerned. Excuse me while I hang my head in shame. By this stage I was feeling less drunk and far more hungover and the lack of sleep was really catching up with me. I picked up my name tag, grabbed my goodie bag and practically crawled over to my table.

 A combination of my Nuffnang & Hello Blogger swag sans Lindt chocolate which I already ate

I basically spent the whole first half of the morning alternating between hogging the water jug on our table and being slumped over the table, resting my head and trying to learn stuff. I barely chatted, did not hand out business cards and barely refrained from vomiting during the icebreaker. Blogger FAIL! It was just my luck that I was sitting next to a style blogger who kept glaring at me for being slumped over the table – I’m pretty sure she was judging me. Oh well…this is me baby!


Regrouping with my blogger peeps and getting some decent food into me definitely helped pep me up after lunch and I was able to sit upright for the last half of the day – talk about progress! I even talked to the people on my table and exchanged some business cards. Go me! Note: no cards were exchanged between style blogger and I.

I’m not going to go into too much detail about the conferencey learny stuff because I know there are HEAPS of posts out there about that. So I will offer my highlights and lowlights. Highlights include the live twitter feed on big screens throughout the venue. Very entertaining and as lame as it is, I really got a kick out of seeing my name up there. This also helped me to score panadol off a random stranger so yay. Other highlight was the presentation by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger who was both informative and entertaining without being preachey and was just genuinely helpful. Lowlights were getting bashed over the head with how much better WordPress is than Blogger and if you’re not on WP you’re doing wrong – this annoyed me for obvious reasons. Other lowlight was the weird crunchy cupcakes. Need I say more?

Official important stuff happening – I’m sure

By the end of the day I was beyond exhausted and given I knew I had an eventful night ahead so I was desperate to get back to the hotel and try and squeeze a little sleep in before we headed out. I searched for about 5 minutes for all my bloggy peeps but I could not see a single one! I don’t know how I missed them but I couldn’t hold out anymore so I trudged back to the hotel only to find out that I didn’t have time for a nap anyway. We had to hurry up and get ready so we could go and get dinner before heading to a gig. I have no idea how rockstars and famous people do this kinda stuff??

We spruced ourselves up and headed back to the Yak Bar for dinner. The staff remember us from the night before which was both amusing and slightly embarrassing but they were friendly. We had the most amazing bread dipped in infused olive oil and the best kalamata olives I’ve ever tasted in my entire life! Then we had the most delicious gnocchi I’ve ever had in my life! It came with ‘Sunday Sauce’ which gets its name from a traditional Italian recipe that is made on Sunday from all the leftover meats from earlier in the week. The waitress assured us we were actually eating beef, pork and rabbit and not real leftovers but I thought it was a really charming story behind the dish.

After that we caught a tram out to Collingwood to a hotel called The Tote for the Swamp Stomp. Apparently a fixture of the Melbourne music scene, The Tote was awesome! When we arrived we got a free shot of Sailor Jerry Rum as we walked through the door. Yes, a straight shot. Given how I was feeling it nearly put me on the floor! That was the only alcoholic drink I had all night. Soft I know but I was quietly dieing! A warm venue with friendly people and moody lighting it was a pleasantly relaxed start to the night with a small-ish group of people sitting on the steps around the stage.


First up was Gator Queen, a local Cajun duo that consisted of a drummer and accordion playing vocalist. Simple but effective, these guys played a spicy mix of sounds of the south. Next up was The Goodtime Medicine Band. These guys were a fantastic surprise! Looking like they were about to start playing bluegrass, they burst out with a powerful and raw old blues sound. For a lanky, hairy white boy the lead vocalist and guitar player was amazingly talented with both his instrument and his voice! I’d see these guys again anytime!


The night finished up with The ReChords who I’ve had the pleasure of seeing before but had forgotten how good these guys are! They had the crowd up on their feet, surging forward and dancing up a storm with their own brand of swap-tacular rockabilly, hillbilly and a touch of doo wop. Such great musicians, I’m super excited to see these guys again this coming weekend at Greazefest! We braved the floor for one dance, which got us quite a few compliments which was nice but it damn near killed me. Will be good to get into some dancing when I’m not so hungover at Greazefest.

When the gig was over, we didn’t hang around for too long as we were both feeling a bit the worse for wear so we caught the tram back to Flinders St, trudged up to our hotel room and fell into bed for a few hours sleep before we started all the adventure again the next day!