AP- Tomorrow's the Day

The last few days in the tech tent have been a blur of new faces, new equipment, new security procedures and the wonder of it all. The AP is a professional organization. However, when they talked about the "chaos" that will ensue in trying to capture the energy and vitality of something like this, they weren't kidding. The convention hasn't even started yet and already we are cattywumpus around the streets of Denver running cards, trying to avoid being tear-gassed, and watching the endless parade of celebrities, the infamous, and the plain old weird.

The tech tent is no longer an icebox; the place is filled with dozens of journalists and where there was time and place for the on-going Monopoly tournament, doing that now would be almost obscene. Next to the AP section of Pavilion #3, we have an oxygen bar, ready to serve. The one commodity that's scarce is food. Not sweets and junk, but real food.

Getting in and out of the DNC perimeter is fierce. It's not like you can come and go at leisure. You also can't bring a cooler filled with food either. Fruits and vegetables are a no-no, since they are low-rent tools for making political criticisms. Runners bring food ordered in from delis around the Lo-Do area, but their average delivery time is about 2 hours. Trying to pair sandwich and owner puts a lot of miles on your meal, and to add insult to injury, a sandwich runs about $8 to $10.

We lost two runners today. One had a bad reaction to food she ate, and another runner collapsed and paramedics had to be called. Heat stroke is very real in Colorado, and a combination of events put our runner on track for a visit with the mobile medics and a trip to the ER. Hydration is the key, and the downtown runners will be carrying several bottles of water in their backpacks to assist the photographers and keep them going as well as keep up their own intake. Some of the interns/runners are on bikes, and pedaling CF cards to the AP office on 14th and Wazee saves time and shoe leather. This was true today when protesters shut down streets around the Civic Center and intersections downtown. Their focus was the Light Rail and mall shuttles, effectively bringing a halt to a quick way to get the "outside" images to a card reader at an editor's desk.

My bike gets loaded up tomorrow morning and it and I will head to downtown. We are splitting shifts between being "inside" assisting the floor photographers who are a few feet away from the podium and being "outside" where the protesters, tent state and heat stroke are waiting on each corner.

We had a quick lesson today in the gas masks that the AP supplies its journalists. Somehow the demonstration of how to use one bring confrontation a little closer, it was easier to believe that the conflict is farther away.