A little sad, a little fine, a little unknown...

Maybe it's just the season, but I'm all of those things...

Boston has been fine. Good to see good people, yet again. 'Worked our tucuses off, trying to make programs about nanoscale science accessible to all audiences. It's been good, but exhausting, and the merry group of informal educators were, by tonight, just tired.

Last night was nutty fun. Before we all got exhausted and worked through...
a) A day in the Museum of Science, hiding in classrooms
b) Happy hour at our swanky hotel. Free wine tasting, and a magician who does card tricks, whom the hotel actually hires to keep conversation at said wine tasting lively. He was lovely.
c) Subway! I do like the smell of a subway. This is not a pleasant smell per se, but it tells me I am someplace different, and yet reminds me of places I've been. I like that.
d) McCormick and Schmidt's. Oysters for the first time ("They taste like the sea, but if the sea tasted good" - Karen). They do. A sensory experience. Delightful.
d.5) Going outside before dinner arrives, and a group of college-y Boston boys offer to strip for us 30+ year old women. This is surreal and just odd and funny. They make $5.
e) New England bay scallops. Lots of chitter chatter. Many bottles of wine. We're partying like Informal Science Educators.
d) Following our leader Tim, over cobblestone and around strange corners, to a bar called "The Bell in Hand". The Bell in Hand has a live hip hop band. DANCING! This... is brilliant.
e) I don't remember paying for anything. I owe.
f) Sometime during the night (I think at Mc Cormick and Schmidt's), I bang my thigh on some table. I have a large purple goose egg on my right thigh.
g) Dancing!!!! Dancingdancingdancing.. wha?
h) Brad and Elizabeth get my sorry butt to a train station. Crash at swanky hotel.
i) Back to hiding in classrooms.
j) Complete long day of talk and performance. I watch some Cartoon Network in the "Fitness Room" of said swanky hotel.
k) Walk to Thai restaurant with HUGE menu. I order something called "Two Buddys One Pot". Gigantimous prawns and small black crabs. I have no idea how to eat this meal.
k.5) Walk through mall to get back to hotel. It's crowded and christmas-y. We had kinda forgot about the rest of the world.
l) Back in bed, leaving on airplane almost as soon as I get up.

Business travel runs one through the paces. We're lucky to be doing it with such nice, fun, smart smart people. I didn't see much of Boston or Cambridge. I didn't see much of the Museum of Science. :( But... We did what we came to do, and that's nice.

Now, just tired, and okay and a little sad and everything under the sun. Very lucky. Can't complain. Just seeped in the unknowning of it all.

See you later, alligators. Onward!