Near sleepless nights on the caucus trail

The Collegian road crew had a quiet day today, as the spent the day way the hell out of dodge in our West Des Moines motel room trying to play catch-up after three days of madness.
Last night, after nonstop travel from Ceder Rapids to see Mike Huckabee, to Amana for a Bill Clinton appearance, trip Des Moines for Huck and Chuck, we drove the final 40 minutes to our motel in Ames to start writing. However, after unloading our equipment at breakneck speed to avoid the Iowa cold, when we all sat down at our respective laptops, it was clear that nobody was in the mood to work.
I don't know how the rest of the crew chose to put off work, but I turned to my old standbys for putting off homework – phone calls and Facebook. After putting a call through to a certain someone and making plans for Friday, the night of our return (giving me a reason to be excited to come home), and checking my Facebook profile about a million times, it was finally time to get to work.
The problem was, after a day of events, I had a million ideas, but no motivation for anything but sleep. I'm sure it was the same for the others.
However, in a true Collegian style, we trudged on until the end, but not without difficulty.
While the writers fought slumber, our resident photog, Brandon Iwamoto, had bigger problems. In the middle of putting together his slide show, he informed the crew that we didn't gather in any audio at Bill Clinton's speech earlier in the day, due to a technical error by the Clinton tech guy.
In spite of the bad news, though, Iwamoto produced yet another killer slide show, using mostly audio from the Huckster's jam session at his morning event.
It wasn't until after 3 a.m. that most of the crew turned in, but we had gotten the job done.
That's why I really admire these guys. Sure, we may be a bunch of trouble-making college students, but when the time comes, we can really buckle down.
Tonight promises to be another long night, as we head back into the heart of Des Moines to see everyone's favorite underdog/nutcase Ron Paul. Hopefully, though, we'll turn in a bit earlier tonight, because with the caucuses tomorrow night, tomorrow promises to be even longer, and I know I'll need a good night's sleep to get through it.
No matter what, though, we'll stick it through to the end. Besides, there's enough time to sleep when we're dead. Right?
-S.R.