Same Place as Last Week

I am sitting in the same hotel, one floor up and one room away from the hotel that I was in last week at this exact same moment. Tomorrow I am going to take the same flight home and eat the same breakfast on the airplane. What is this, day 9? I am not looking forward to Sunday, in which I will, once again, leave the kids.

I had about and hour long phone conversation today with Crab Boy, while I was driving through the mountains and into Denver. For the first five minutes or so, all he did was talk baby talk to me. Most of the time, that just bugs me, but today it was cute. Maybe because all I had to do was listen to his baby talk and drive. There were no meetings or people or other crap to deal with. It was nice. He has never talked on the phone for more than about 5 minutes with me before. Today, he talked and talked. Then had to hang up to eat dinner. Then he called back, and he talked more. Then the phone went dead, and I called him back when I got out of the mountains. He is growing up.

I gave a 45 minute talk today at the workshop I was at. It went ok. I was pretty worried about it, since it was, in essence, a non-science talk. My ex-grad student called it a 45 minute advertisement. Which it was - it discussed the history of this code that some people use to do data assimilation and how it has changed and enabled a huge amount of science that could not have been done before. But, I think that people enjoyed it. I joked around a lot. I don't think that anyone fell asleep.

The sad thing is, though, that I have no time off. I have to prepare for my travel next week - I have a talk first thing on Monday. So, I have to do a bunch of crap (crap = model runs) this weekend to prepare.

An update on my Post Doc - he went to Europe a few days ago. He finished the paper that he was supposed to get done before he left. We are unsure of the results of the modeling study, since he got different results than I got (hmmmm....), but the paper is going to be in a non-reviewed conference proceedings, so it doesn't matter too much. We will clear up the model issues when he gets home in a month.

One of my grad students is off to China next week. She is really the work-horse of the group. It is totally unbelievable the things that she can accomplish. We have outlined two papers that she is going to work on (one is almost finished, one has the runs and such done). These will be her 4th and 5th papers that she has written. And she is just finishing her 3rd year. I am pretty ok with her taking a vacation!

Today I did something that I haven't done in a long time - I took some time out of the conference and went for a hike with some of the student (well - some are now ex-students). It is sad that I don't do this more often.

Well, time to relax a bit and work on some more talks!