Monday, monday

Well we got there. First we heard about protein targeting to the chloroplast via the Toc/Tic complex, and particularly Toc 159 and its variants, but I fell asleep before we got to hearing about chloroplast biogenesis. Then there was a talk by Roger Hangarter which was awesome. He also told jokes and showed funny pictures and also serious pictures, and also movies. He studies chloroplast movements in response to light. The effect has such subtlety that you can shine a greyscale image on a leaf and after about thirty minutes you can take away the image and view the leaf in normal light and there it will be in greenscale.

So those were cool, and he also had microscope movies of chloroplasts moving within a cell in response to different treatments. He has a postdoc position open but I won't be graduating for a while yet...

For the coffee break we went to a real coffee shop and had breakfast, too. A new crazy lady appeared in our lives, she was very quiet but her eyes were very squinky and her jaws were very gummy. Every time I looked up from the table she was squinking at me, but maybe that's just how her eyes were. She looked like a mumbler when I first saw her, but then once she sat down with her drink and her muffin she was like an ordinary person - except for the eyes.

They had tic-tac-toe games on the paper napkins at this coffee shop, and Eric taught me a few things about x and o strategy. He even let me win a few times. We decided we weren't interested in any more organelle activities, but there wasn't a shuttle from the hotel for a while, and we weren't going to make the mistake of trying to walk again. So we found the bus, and the walk up Industrial Boulevard was actually quite nice without any roller bag to haul around.

Then I took a nap, and Eric read Sherlock Holmes. I woke up in time for us to get back for the Minisymposia but then I decided I'd rather sleep some more. Eric had just gotten an email from Rien saying that the big symposia wore him out and we should be sure to take some breaks, so we felt quite justified in staying in. When I woke up for real I felt a little guilty, because one of the sessions was on Fertilization and Embryo Development, which is what most of Pat's research is on, and another was on Biofuels - except, biofuels in this case meant lipid production from algae. Is this how most professors deal with this conference? Do they pick and choose and have hours and hours every day free? Do they spend a lot of time writing in their hotel rooms, free from distractions? Or do they force themselves to sit through every session and go to all the events? One striking thing is that people rarely ask questions at the end of a presentation. So what are they doing while they're sitting there for half an hour or so? Wool-gathering while looking respectable? It's very frustrating, I'm not sure what we're doing here or what we're supposed to get out of it, especially when truly entertaining talks seem to occur at random. Who would have thought that "Regulation of light-dependent chloroplast movements in leaves" would be so interesting?

But it is our first time at a conference, and no professors are here except Dan Bush who is schmoozing all the time and not taking us out to lunch, so I suppose we can do as we please.

An aside: Rootabaga Stories are available on the Kindle - no illustrations, just the text, but still - I made Eric listen to the first story about Gimme the Axe and his family traveling to the Village of Liver and Onions, and he neither fell asleep nor flew into a rage, so I guess he's a keeper.

Another aside: On Sunday, the second speaker about RNA was utterly unmemorable except for his habit of saying "per se" at the end of every sentence. It was making Eric quite squirmy to hear it after a while, although then he adopted it himself and uses it quite freely now. Per se. I wonder how you would even pick that habit up.