Last week I was in Keystone, CO for work. We left Sunday morning early and arrived safe at home late on Friday night. I'm in the process of uploading my pictures onto Flickr, so let me know if you'd like to see them. It was an OK meeting. Truth is, I went to the same meeting 2 years ago when it was held in Vancouver, BC. Back then I was more idealistic and excited about things. This time was a bit different in that, unless they were giving me information that I could use and apply directly to my thesis work, I just didn't care so much. I'm in that "jaded" stage of graduate school where there is little sunlight shining down and a person is going to have to work really hard to convince me to do something unrelated to my graduation date. But there were some good talks and I had some good conversations that I think will help me very much with my work. I have also promised to send people protocols and plasmids and cell lines that I have made. This does not help me, but if I were in their shoes, I know how much time and energy and money it would save to have someone hook me up in the same way.
The way the conference was set up was that there were meetings from 8am-11am then you had a break and then more meetings from 5-7pm followed by dinner and then poster sessions from 7:30pm-10pm where you could look in greater detail at people's work and data and talk to them.
I did manage to have some fun though. The first day, me and my friends Jen and Amit went on a 2 hour snowshoeing trek. We took the ski gondola to the top of the mountain and then snowshoed around the rim of a basin. The views were incredible!!! And, since we were at around 13,000 feet elevation, we were really huffing and puffing. Day two Jen and I decided that it was way too cold to go play outside so we went to the nearby outlet mall where we found great sales at Nine West. We both found a pair of boots for around $40. What a deal! Wednesday we were lazy and I walked around the condo we were staying in and took some more pictures.
Thursday was the most fun though. On Tuesday, the night I had my poster session, I met a pretty cool guy Jim. Anyhow, we ended up having dinner every night and then drinks afterwards and we got to talking about skiing. I had never been skiing and he said that he was sure that he could teach me. So, on Thursday, I took him up on it and we ended up skiing (the easy slopes) that day. It was absolutely wonderful. Made easier because Jim is pretty patient and didn't mind doing the little bitty slopes multiple times until I could stop properly. I picked it up fairly quickly and by the end of the day was going all the way down the green slopes (not the learning ones). So that was cool. And, I made a new friend, which is always great.
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