More travel

This past week Jenny took the kids to visit with her family and I went to Fort Lauderdale Florida to attend another conference.  So obviously I don't have anything to report on the kids and Jenny, other than the fact that I was assured that they got there safely.  As for my trip, I had a great time!  I actually didn't do anything other than conference stuff.  Mostly because I had just done the tourist thing in Hawaii.  But the conference was really great!  The project director I work for had asked me to come along as a last minute thing because the presentation for our project had received an award and been bumped up to a plenary talk!  (There were only two plenary talks at the conference.)  So this was another of those all-expenses paid trips.  And this time they put me up in a Sheraton.  But the Sheraton looked like a dump compared to the school where the conference was held!  I heard varying figures, but the general consensus was that tuition for this K-12 school is between $20,000 and $40,000 a year! The place looked like a really, really nice college campus!  Even the playground for the younger kids had astroturf!  They had awards for more different types of sports than I've ever even participated in during my entire life!  And not just that, but everyone was very friendly!  They had a bunch of student volunteers with uniforms made specifically for this conference all over the place just helping us poor old folks not get lost.  And you know what else?!  This one K-12 school has over ten foreign language teachers!  :O  But the best part was the food!  They provided breakfast and lunch each day, and the food was prepared by the school's personal gourmet chef!  I didn't even know what I was eating half the time, but it was goooooooood!!  So, back to the conference itself.  Our talk was the first talk of the second full day of the conference.  We presented it in a room that looked like a $15 per ticket movie theater room.  The screen was, well, huge!  And there were at least a hundred people in the theater seating.  So, as you might imagine, the two of us were a little nervous to say the least.  But the presentation went really well!  There were even collective gasps of amazement and we were actually interrupted with cheering and applause at one point!  (Not to mention that they gave each of a check for $166.66 as part of the award we had won.)  Okay, enough self-aggrandizement.  I also really enjoyed the talks I was able to go to.  The presentations at this conference were a lot different from the ones at the conference we presented at in Hawaii, and it was really interesting to see their different point of view!  Well, okay, maybe a little more self-aggrandizement.  Normally at these conferences I make a couple new friends and make contacts with a couple of important people.  Doing this usually takes some effort on my part to overcome my natural inclination for shyness.  Well, after our presentation I actually had people coming up to me and wanting to introduce themselves, give me their business cards, asking me for my 'expert' opinion, and inviting me to join them at their table for the banquet!  (Boy did I have them fooled!)  Okay, I'm really done this time.  Time to reign my ego back in and get back to real life.  <sigh>