Sunday, July 22, 2007

Flying Home

After a couple hours sleep, I left for the airport. I got to fly over Yosemite on the way from Chicago to SFO finally. It's amazing how disconnected you can feel when you're busy and away. This conference has been really intense in many ways. Listening to talks day-in and day-out is always exhausting when they're not in your field and you have to struggle to understand what's going on. I was part of the organizers for this conference in a small but signifigant way. I was in charge of the poster rooms - layout, setup, roster, etc, and I helped Karen with lots of little things. That kept me moving boards around, dealing with people's issues, and skipping lunches a few times to change layouts. It wasn't bad, but it did add to the intensity. I think the best part was getting to know Inge Loes ten Kate, the Dutch "Scandanavian". Don't worry - I didn't know how to pronounce it right the first time either. I gave up a lot of sleep getting to know her. We did something most nights and it made the time go by really quickly. She's was the one other person to present something engineer-ish, so we had some good shop-talk too. She's at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center outside DC building what I'd say is an electrified, mars-atmosphere-like chamber so she can simulate the effect of lighting on mars. I also got to meet lots of different grad students as part of the AbGradCon thing the first few days. It made it easier to find good people to hang with, and most dinners were big groups of us. It's pretty amazing how you can get so adjusted to a routine or a different way of life over 10 days - and then 5am hits, you're in a taxi, on an airplane, staring out a window for ages, finally left exhausted, half-way around the world, back to your home you haven't seen much in the last year. It's quite a shock. I leave again Thursday for Haleakala and another 7 days on the mountain, then I'm done! What a trip this last year has been.....


Jose helping me finish up the posters.
Chicago.
The eastern front of the sierra nevada.
Half-dome from above.

The eastern side of Owens Valley.

1 Comments:

Blogger Diane Harrington said...

great shots

8:51 AM  

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