Back for a second

I am back from Santa Fe and wanted to check in quickly before we head our for our Thanksgiving family trip.

The trip was great, I wish that I would have taken along a camera so I could share photos.  I drove across northern Arizona to northern New Mexico and then down, and it is just some amazing and wild country.  I saw such cool rock formations.

The resort was fabulous, very fancy.  Although it comes at a price, I went to eat dinner with some colleagues one night at the resort and my dinner was $38, and it was nothing special.  And if you wanted internet it was $10/day so I did not even take my computer.  When I got there I saw they had a business center, so I went to check it out because every other hotel I've ever stayed at had free internet access in their business center, but nope, they had a credit card swiper and you got the first 10 minutes free, but after that it was $0.50/minute.  The first time I tried to check my email and Facebook I got charged $1.50, but the second time I had to fork over $5.00 and I didn't even have time to get to my blogs!

The conference was great.  I spoke with one of the coordinators and she said they thought they might have 100-150 people participate, but they ended up having over 350.  There were people there from all over the country.  I was a bit taken back during the very first session that I went to, it was given by a woman from the mid-west who I had never met before, but during her presentation she showed a picture of me teaching my kids.  In the big picture I don't mind if EPA folks use my photos, but it just seemed kind of weird that I wasn't asked for permission in this case and it made me wonder how many times my photos have been used with out me knowing it.  In between one of the sessions a man came up to me and introduced himself and said he saw a talk that I gave at conference 2 years ago and wanted to tell me that he appreciated what I had to say and that I got some of the cultural significance related to the topic I was speaking about.  He also remembered Austin as that is the conference that I took Austin to when he was about 9 months old and he was a handful!