A whole lotta nothin'

That pretty well describes our Saturday in Chicago...well, more so for Brian than for me. The day started for me with a run along the beautiful shore of lake Michigan. The weather was perfect and the route gives a great view of the city skyline. My conference presentation wasn't until 4:45 and, while I had a few other conference-related things to attend to and a stack of grading, Brian "convinced" me to spend most of the morning/afternoon in our hotel room watching HBO. We watched the end of "Jurassic Park", all of "27 Dresses", and all of "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" (an HBO original). Yep, that's about five hours of TV...and it felt great to do next to nothing!

My presentation went fine. For those of you who aren't familiar with "nerd fests", the conference is structured into panels. Each panel has 3-5 participants who wrote research papers on similar topics and a "discussant" whose job it is to critique (or praise) the papers after everyone presents. Each person gets about 15 minutes to present their research, then the discussant talks, then they open it up to the audience (usually only about 10 people) to ask questions. The point of this whole silly enterprise is to give people a chance to talk about their research and get feedback from people who generally know something about the subject. There aren't usually a lot of people in the audience at each panel because there are lots of panels going on at the same time (about 50). Anyway, I always get a little nervous because it's a scary thing to talk about your research and then hear a public critique of it. I've seen discussants rip people apart. It's not pretty! In this case (as in every other case), I really shouldn't have been worried. The discussant said he enjoyed reading the paper and he encouraged people in the audience to get a copy. He also gave me some very helpful suggestions for ways to fix some of the problems I ran into. Brian told me I should stop stressing out about presentations, but I think my stressing out is one of the reasons I usually end up not having much to stress out about.

After my panel we jumped on the El (Chicago's public transit) and headed to Hyde Park to have dinner with my friend Larycia. Larycia lives just a few blocks from Obama's house, so she drove us by. Brian tried to take a photo, but it was getting pretty dark by that time.


We had a fun time seeing Larycia's apartment and having dinner with her and two of her friends from graduate school. Brian appreciated the fact that Larycia's friends also realized and could laugh about that the conference was a nerd fest.

We had a good trip home today. Now it's time for me to get to the grading I avoided all weekend.

Oh, and here's my funny political moment from the weekend. We were walking past a construction site. See if you can tell what's missing from this sign. I thought this was a very funny way to handle an embarrassment.