I may be a dork, but I'm a validated dork now

I am posting this from the staff office at the hotel in Denver where my conference is taking place. It's currently a smidge before 7:00 a.m. local time, and since the meetings don't get underway until noon, I'm the only one dumb enough to be up and about yet. There will be many days of wake up calls and early room set-ups, so everyone else is taking advantage of the time to sleep in. This is my first meeting without my boss, Beth, as a safety net, so I was freaking out a bit about it before I left town yesterday. Anything that goes wrong is on my head this time. On the other hand, anything that goes right shows everyone that I am competant at my job, not just an employee who is managed well. My friend Lee is the assistant to our CEO, and she is on the trip this time to help me out with the running around and small stuff that comes up during the course of the week. She shared a cab from the airport with the Big Boss yesterday, and they made small talk about the conference, and Beth's absence, and how things were flowing. Lee said that she felt as though everything was running quite well even though my boss was gone, and BigBoss shocked the hell out of us and agreed with her. BigBoss thinks that Beth walks on water, so he has been known, all too often, to credit her with the success of those of us that work for her. Good work from people is often to the credit of a good manager, but BigBoss tends to only see the people right in front of him, so his direct reports get the praise (and in all fairness, they also get the brunt of his displeasure when employees below them don't measure up.) It seems that, unsolicited, BigBoss told Lee that he was very pleased with my meeting preparation- that the briefing materials were wonderful. I have to confess that when Lee relayed this compliment to me, I literally jumped up and down in a little happy dance in the hotel lobby. Now I just need to move beyond "pat on the head" and on to "fancy title and more money."