So there I was at the Charlotte airport on a two-hour layover headed home (2 days early than planned due to the Frankenstorm headed to the Northeast), and I posted this status on Facebook:
2 hour layover in Charlotte :/ And no free wifi.
And then, right when I post, I hear Debbie Fords voice in my head, "Are you looking for what's right or are you looking for what's wrong?" -- which is one of her "10 questions" to ask when making decisions, or pretty much always in life. And of course I had posted what's wrong. So I decided to follow it up with what's right:
A safe & on-time flight. No delay in next flight. I'm healthy & happy & reading a great new book: The Happiness Project. I randomly met a cool guy in the airport restaurant in Raleigh: a businessman with a PhD in anthropology whose headed to central Africa in a couple weeks with his wife to see chimps & mountain gorillas (So jealous). Lots more :)
I was headed home from the National Association of Science Writers (NASW) conference - the third and final conference I have attended in the past month! I am all conferenced out. First it was SXSW-Eco in Austin, followed by a week at home, then the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Medicine in the Media program - which was absolutely fantastic! That was in Potomac, Maryland but I got to spend a day in DC with a friend. Home a week, then to this conference held in Raleigh, NC. I headed home two days early due to the Frankenstorm... I tell ya, from the moment I arrived in Raleigh, it was one craziness after another!
I arrived one day before the conference to see an old friend who moved to NC 8 years ago, but she got sick at the last minute, so I had to find a hotel room and something to do. I decided to cab it to the Duke Lemur Center (which, it turns out, is the actual home of Zoboo of Zoboomafoo -- a kids show on PBS about a coquerel's sifaka - a type of lemur). They also do a lot of research, and I got to do a tour and see a lot of the lemur species, an 'aye aye' with its freaky weird long finger, and a slow loris with its huge cute eyes. They have large enclosures of the Duke Research Forest where some of the lemurs roam in a more natural habitat, but I didn't get to see them because that's only on the "behind the scenes" tour. It was really neat to see the place though!
The next day, I had lunch with one of my favorite editors at Beyu Caffe in downtown Durham. I had the Thai Sauteed Veggies and mmmm it was so good! After that, I headed over to Research Triangle Park for the start of the conference. The first day we had half-day tours, and I took a tour of the company Medicago and their greenhouses where they are using a tobacco relative to make flu vaccines, rather than chicken eggs as are normally used. Then, we went to an EPA research facility where I learned about the use of cleaning robots to study how they might decontaminate from an anthrax bioterrorist attack. While my friend and colleague Nancy and I were on the tour, one of our other roommates checked into the hotel only to find out they had given our hotel room away! This was just the start of my travel woes!
We had to scramble to get another room at a nearby hotel - which we did, thankfully. But they were double rather than queen beds, and we were planning on having 2 to a bed. The first night in a place, I sometime can't sleep so well in my 'old age' especially when other people are there (I never used to be this way... could sleep anywhere, head hits the pillow and I was out!) but I tossed and turned for hours so by 1am I gave up, and went down to the lobby and got my own room. Then the comedy of errors began... the first new room reeked of cigarette smoke. Then I realized I'd left my cell phone in the other room with sleeping friends, and so I just needed to make sure the alarm would go off. I tried to get the alarm clock to work but that thing would not work for the life of me (maybe it was the 1am stupor... I dunno), so I picked up the phone for a wake up call instead, but there was no dial tone. Argh. So I got on the elevator, went back to the other room, snuck in quietly and found my phone, then back to my new room.
In this crazed sleepless, tired, discombobulated state, at 2am, I decided to postpone my Costa Rica trip. As much as I can't WAIT to go to Costa Rica and see the sloth sanctuary, I just feel like I've been traveling too much, and I'm traveled out for a while. I need to stick at home and get some work done and make some money, and also wasn't too keen about traveling on my own. Originally my friend was going to go but she had to do something else. And, in this same state of affairs, I called the airlines and switched my ticket home from NC to 2 days earlier; I got in last night at 1am. The conference was interesting but honestly I didn't think it held a candle to the SEJ conferences. I'll stick to them from here on out, I think! I am super happy to be home, and am about to dig into a new article.
Sir Walter Raleigh wearing a lab coat in honor of the NASW conference. The sky was darkening as Hurricane Sandy approached.
Nancy and I went out and had mojitos at the Marriott bar one night! :)
And a bonus pic of my sweet kitty, who thinks she is my "armrest" while I work on my laptop .
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