Thoughts on the Texas Rangers halfway through...

The more and more I do these, the more and more I come to the conclusion that I need perhaps to outline what I want to say beforehand instead of just jabbering on at random.  But I did not take my own advice for this particular post...

The Rangers have a had a tremendous first half of the season which could only be better had we kept the first place we had for the majority of the first few months.  In the following audio clip, I discuss some of the positive aspects of the season so far and mention a few things about the All-Star game.  Frankly this only scratches the surface of the Rangers related topics that I could cover.  So you will have to hit me up personally if you want to talk some baseball...

       

Rhode Island…Hello…

So for the past week or so I have been in the great(?) state of Rhode Island at a conference about photochemistry.  Which means several things: 

(1) Flew in an airplane for the second time in six months after not flying in more than 8 years (wow!)

(2) Got to get out of the lab for a while. (Always nice to be able to do from time to time.)

(3) Visited a state before my brother did.  (Haha…Derek :-))

This particular conference, more so than other larger events like the ACS meetings or something like that, is a very tight quarters, close-knit kinda thing.  There were maybe 100-150 people at the conference and we all stayed college-style literally in a bunch of dorm rooms.  This means that over the course of the five days of the conference everyone got to see plenty of one another.  There were talks scheduled every morning from breakfast until lunch followed by an afternoon break leading up to poster sessions and dinner, then the evening was capped with more talks until about 9:30 on a nightly basis.

Now I will give some personal thoughts about my experience at the conference.  I guess I will do this in more or less bullet form and random in nature:

• Despite some improvement in many ways over the last half-dozen or so years.  I am still pretty deficient in being “social” or making small-talk with random people.  Large group situations always make me apprehensive and I usually hang out on the periphery.  I think I can be much more open and talkative on a one-on-one basis or with a group of people, but handling the masses of people is just not something I am comfortable with.  Unfortunately, it takes a bit of initiative on one’s part at these sort of conferences to talk to the biggest and brightest names.  I kinda think I am once again miss out somewhat due to my own personal short comings. 

• The location of the conference was at Bryant University, which happens to be like in the middle of some very boring woods, removed from the rest of Rhode Island.  Due to the time restraints with the meeting schedule, there was not time to actually see what would presumably be the cool parts of Rhode Island.  The only thing that I got to see that was remotely interesting outside of the chemistry was a family of skunks that was skulking around around dusk after a night of talks, and this pretty mundane lake at the center of campus.  (Some nice lily pads though…)
  
  
• I have to admit having three catered meals a-day was very nice.  I haven’t that nice of breakfasts in very long time.  I did get to try the little bit of northeast cuisine that they prepared for us.  I had some grilled salmon and tuna that were presumably caught around RI (maybe?).  I missed out on the New England clam chowder, but on the final day we did get to have lobster (my first having that before).  Really eating those is a pain…I think I will stick with steak personally.
  
  
• Now we had a pretty rigorous schedule of talks on a daily basis, divided into series of related subjects in photochemistry.  I would not call myself a photochemist by any stretch, so certainly there were a lot of subjects on which I had no interest and as a result there a was some periodic dozing on my part.  Honestly, I don’t know how anyone could have avoided nodding off at least once during the course of the week. 

• I guess I should talk a little about what benefit I got from attending. Well…simply sitting in the room for five days listening to talks and talking with others about their research I think I come away understanding a lot of subjects better than I did previously.  Among the people I did talk to a large extent, which turned out to be mostly post-docs and young assistant professors, I was able to be somewhat encouraged by what the future holds for someone that may be interested in following an academic track.  Particularly interesting was the type of research being done at primarily undergraduate institutions and the kind of expectations leveled on the professors research-wise.  My own poster went well at the poster session. I received some good feedback and was able to communicated at a reasonable level with others.  Definitely something that I can build off of. 

• I consistently missed out on the late night chit-chat among attendees which is probably where the most fun or insight comes from.  This is because of three-fold reasons: (1) I am tired at night after a full day of talks, and am ready for some quiet alone time. (2) See my other point above about socializing, frankly any non-mandatory socializing is not something I will be doing too much of. (3) I am not a fan of beer or wine (basically alcohol in general) so the prospects of getting drinks, especially coupled with points 1 and 2 is not going to make me very excited. 

• I guess I will close with another positive point.  I have never been a very good flyer.  I really just don’t like the process that it takes to do it, but after flying a couple times the last few month I am beginning to see it as being pretty darn useful for reaching places that seem out of reach with a car.  (Would I ever drive to RI? Don’t think so.)

So that is kind of a summary of my Rhode Island trip…I really didn’t talk about the chemistry, but you can hit me up for that if you really care.

A couple blogs to look forward to in coming weeks…one should be a Rangers related post since we are at the All-star break and I haven’t written (complained) about the Rangers as much as I have in the past.  So the halfway point of the season is a good place to take stock and talk about the first half and where I think the second half of the season is headed.

Finally, I think it is nearing the point where I need one of those soul-baring kind of posts that spill the beans on some of my inner turmoil.  (The kinds of posts my mom just loves…)  Look for that certainly in the coming weeks.