So I'm sitting on a five hour flight from Boston to Phoenix with at least another hour to go. I suppose it is nice that I am not stuck in another departure lounge, and that I will be home tonight. I am on my way back from the national American Chemical Society meeting, where on Sunday I arrived and gave my talk, and then today I chaired a session and made my getaway. I could have stayed another day, but decided against it even though there were some interesting things going on.
The summer has been very busy, and I have not been writing nearly enough. In the end I did not buy a $2,000 tricross bicycle, as I had so many other things that needed to be taken care of first. After getting back from Australia, Sereana and I spent some time in San Francisco and then drove to Yosemite National Park. We stayed in a yurt and that was a lot of fun. After Yosemite we left the lush Sierra Nevada Mountains for the hot, dry and dusty Nevada basin. We stayed in Panamint Spring inside Death Valley national Park, and as you might expect it was damn hot. We discovered that rental cars can go 100 miles per hour across the dry lake beds and at such speed it did not take too long to get to Las Vegas. I actually preferred the silent and empty Death Valley to the crowded and noisy Las Vegas, but at least I had the opportunity to experience the gaudy scene. We drove to Phoenix, dropped off the hire car and then drove home. Quite the adventure for one single week.
Once back at the lab, it was work, work and more work. After my students generated some new results, I flew out to Boston and then Rhode Island for the regular Gordon Research conference in mid-July. It was a lot of fun, but hot and humid as always. I was hoping to drive back to home, but I had booked myself into a triathlon on the Sunday after the conference, and so instead I flew directly back.
The race was a 700 meter swim, 18 kilometer bike ride and a 5 kilometer run. I had decided to participate in a “sprint” triathlon as a motivator to get me into an exercise regime again, and for the most part it worked. I had not swum that many laps in a very long time, and I at least had a metric for my general level of fitness. In the end I got slightly fitter and had an ok time. The wetsuit I had hired almost drowned me because it was too small across the shoulders, but after a terrible transition to the bike leg, I made up a lot of ground. I finished in the top ten for women in my age group in a time of just slightly over one and a half hours. I don't know if that is the best comparison point, but I think there were a lot of people who had snazzier equipment and actually knew what they were doing, so I don't feel too bad about it.
The next little adventure after the triathlon was a trip to Las Vegas for Defcon 15. Defcon is a hacker's convention that is held once a year in the Riviera casino. I was able to convince Adam to come down from Bozeman and hang out, and it was much more enjoyable having a friend to see the talks and workshops with. Sadly Adam is somewhat smitten with me, and I need to shut him down without hurting him. Sadly I think the two things are mutually incompatible. Nevertheless we had a nice time and learnt a lot of new stuff.
I had a weekend where I wasn't traveling anyway and so I spent that chilling out with Sereana. My students were finishing up and so I was trying to squeeze as much work out of them as possible. Happily when one first enters a new research area, there is a lot of new things to discover and so the summer has been fairly productive. I spent much of early August preparing my presentation for the ACS conference.