We feasted and took the free shuttle in to the Convention Center in time for the first talks on regulatory RNAs. I cannot even remember the first two talks because I was dying of sleepiness. I began to think swimming so early might have been a bad idea.
Then there was the coffee break, at last! A woman tried to cut in front of me and I told her, Excuse me, we've all been waiting. She was quite chastised and I happily got my coffee in front of her. Then we stood around for twenty minutes and I felt really dumb for fussing about the line. I had another cup to soothe my nerves.
We went back in and listened to Pam Green, whose lecture I also don't remember, but I do remember her because she was the only woman and she was the organizer. I started feeling like a big failure at this going to conferences thing. Next was Leslie Sieburth, a man, who claimed to have exciting videos related to mRNA decay, so I prevailed on Eric to stay so that we might see these exciting videos. I have no idea how exciting they might have been, because half-way through Johnnie called.
He said he had big news, and I said with my normal volume voice in the hallway devoid of people to absorb the sound waves, Oh, Rachel's pregnant! He said I wish and then told me the real news. I had to walk outside to hear it. Then I had to call Mom.
Mom agreed that the giant symposia on subjects not to your interest sounded sucky, and said I should get her a postcard, so that I would have a mission to fulfill. Instead I took a nap on Eric and then we got lunch at a fancy restaurant.
We made it back in time for the next symposium, on Vegetative Development. The first speaker, Jocelyn Malamy, talked about lateral root mutants and what sort of signals affected lateral roots. It was interesting to look at her pictures of roots until she started talking about the mechanisms. Then Tobias Baskin talked about polarity in roots. He actually made a joke, and spoke with modulated tones, so Eric and I liked his presentation a lot. The next speaker had just gotten a faculty position and was just setting up her lab, so she told us a little of her post-doc work and of what she hoped to do in her lab. This could have been an exciting talk full of potentialities and theories instead of just boring data, but instead she whispered to us about the body plan of mosses. I was out.
We went into the sunshine and light and thought it was such a nice day we might as well walk back to the hotel, especially since it was just 2.7 miles. Again there were the crazies, and the angry young people, and lots of smokers. No one smokes in Colorado, I realize now. We went past the ING building which has crazy patterned marble slabs all around the outside, and many fountains, including one that is a long trench going from the building, which is set back a ways, right up to the sidewalk. The water is carried along several feet above the ground until bam! It falls right in front of you in a glorious sheet.
We walked over the Mississippi River, and I spat in it for good luck. There were apartments on the far side of the river with balconies, and I envied them their umbrellas and their beer buckets and their view. By now we were ready to be done walking, but we were only halfway there. We moved further and further away from the downtown but fortunately the neighborhoods didn't seem too run down. There were also no grocery stores where we might have gotten some food supplies. We saw a couple who had clearly just come from the grocery store, but when we looked down the street they came from it was blocked off with a concrete wall....
Eventually the houses ended and we were back to old Industry-Land. But finally, finally, we got there. Aahhhh. I checked on Google maps and it was 5.2 miles from the convention center to the hotel what?!? So we took our tired feet down to the pool where a family was throwing a ball back and forth, and the one 11 year old boy was dying for their incompetence at keeping it in the air, and letting us all know. The hot tub was closed too.
So we got dinner at the hotel restaurant and thought about what would happen the next day, and rested comfortable in the knowledge that at least we did something with ourselves this day.
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