The Conference

Golden Colorado

I have safely arrived back to Provo after a long, physics-filled weekend. Highlights were:

1.My own room, 2 beds, one person! Heavenly. Although I did miss Jimmy. He does make the bed a lot warmer ;) It also prompted me to think about buying new pillows. Ours at home are just not as comfortable as the hotel pillows. La Quinta you know how to stock pillows.


2. My presentation at 8:48 am. There were not too many people (which was nice). But even with that, I thought I did a pretty good job. I didn't go over on time, and I could answer all the questions they asked me. It was quite fabulous!



3.Astronaut from NASA. He had been to space 5 times, 3 of which were to service the Hubble Space Telescope. I must say, he was fantastic. In his talk he showed us video of the trip. It was a very humbling experience to see Earth from that vantage point.

4.The van-ride. This is many not be the highlight, but it afforded a great chunk of the trip. We traveled 5ish hours Thursday, 3ish on Friday morning, and the large 8 hours for our trip home yesterday. We made it home around 11:30 pm. Long day, needless to say. Dr. Migenes was entertaining as always, and we had some very interesting physics and non-physics conversations. And the scenery was quite lovely. I enjoyed driving into and up the mountains! Beautiful!


5. Feeling smart because I actually had questions to ask. The set-up to these conferences is normally big talks for everyone, and sessions of talks having to do with specific topics. You pick and chose as there are parallel sessions with numerous topics. I went to sessions that had at least a small connection to astronomy. In 2 out of the 3 I was able to ask some sort of question. It made me feel like an actual graduate student. Hooray for feeling like I have learned something!

6. Getting home to see my very excited husband. It was a delightful trip, but I did in fact miss my bestest friend. When I got home he had 2 surprizes for me. First, he had fixed the light in our bedroom that seemed to have a wire loose, and second he bought Ben and Jerry's from Smiths. By the way it is cheapest there. We have bought it in numerous locations, including the factory store in Vermort. Just over $2 is a steal. He got my favorite Chunky Monkey, and Smore's. He is so good to me. And the laundry was done, and we had some food that we needed. What a wonderful guy!

So back to the grind. Tomorrow is my "ahhhh-I need to catch-up" day!