ISN EC and other letters

Wow. Almost a week since I posted last? Let's see what's happened...

All my current students seemed to have gotten on well, and are continuing to make progress.

I had two new students, Gloria and Anna, walk into my office on Tuesday asking if they might be able to do Honors projects with me in the fall.

I managed to sneak out with Isaiah and Nisha to the Coastal Studies Lab to collect some sand crabs on Thursday. Fortunately, we had reasonable success to pull some animals up without too much time. Though the return trip did take slightly longer than I anticipated, but I think Nisha was able to make arrangements so that her friends would forgive her for her instructor bringing her into Uni 20 minutes late...

On Friday, I set off on another trip. This time I was off to Chicago to attend the executive committee meeting of the International Society for Neuroethology (ISN). Unfortunately, the trip to Chicago was not smooth, nor welcome. I had just come back Monday, and the Houston airport was a zoo then. I didn't want to go back through Houston airport two more times in less than a week...

And I got stuck there for about four hours longer than I was supposed to be. There were thunderstorms in Chicago, and they weren't letting any incoming flights in. At one point, they went so far as to load us on the plane before they turned back to the terminal and cancelled the flight all together.

I finally got to Chicago, and that airport was also a zoo. I had to take a cab to the hotel and had a touchy moment with the cabbie ("What do you mean, you don't take credit cards in this cab?"). I was in a terribly foul mood that night, which wasn't improved by waking up at 5:00 am the next morning. Fortunately, it did improve slightly during the meeting itself. We managed to get through the agenda in reasonable time, though it did take the whole day.

The major compensation for the trip came that night, were the committee members got treated to a rather nice meal at Va Pensiero.

Flew back Sunday, and had another odd experience at Chicago airport. I was sitting, happily reading a paperback science fiction novel, when a woman walked up to me and said, "Dr. Faulkes?" I raised my eyebrows and said uncertainly, "Yeeeeeah?" Turns out she was a Biology major from UTPA who was going to be taking my Neurobiology course in the fall. She was in Chicago as part of a leadership conference sort of thing.

And on the last leg of the flight from Houston, I was pretty sure I saw our University's provost on the plane. But I may have been mistaken, since this person was flying first class, and administrators would never fly first class when their University was in the middle of budget cutbacks, would they...?

The first thing I had to do this morning was to go to a meeting regarding a Howard Hughes Medical Institution grant our Dean is spearheading. Now, I think I just have a lot of writing to do in that last couple of weeks before classes start up again.