I survived the conference. I survived traveling in Delta Discomfort Minus class. Mostly because I was offended that Delta would try to shake me down for a few extra dollars in exchange for things that I wasn’t convinced that they could actually provide. I’ve had my seat assignments ignored due to equipment changes, and I have endured rude and capricious treatment by gate agents (from any number of airlines) when traveling on upgrade-type tickets, so I wasn’t going to pay extra money and still run the risk of suffering at the whims of the airlines. I used to have status. I used to fly first class (well, the J pretending to be F that we have on domestic flights). So really anything in coach is going to be terrible by comparison.

In other personal aviation news, when my flight took off on Wednesday, April 11, it took off on Runway 9. That never happens. Like, you almost never see planes departing on Runway 9. Never, ever, ever. Even when the clouds come in so low that they need to have the arrivals come in on the ILS 9, much more often than not, the departures are going to be using 27. Departures on 9? CRAZY. And we took off on Runway 9. (I’ve still never been on a flight that has landed on 9.) I have no idea what sort of weather made that happen because there was not any weather that I could see. Magical winds? No idea.

The conference was jam-packed with all sorts of conferencing. Because the flight options for Sunday were all both terrible and expensive, I left on Saturday instead of staying until the end. So I felt obligated to go to a lot of talks. But also because I was supposed to be meeting new people, as one does at a conference, I sort of felt bad that I did go to so many talks because maybe there would have been interesting people to meet in various lounges and lobbies and such. Due to poor planning and indecisiveness, I did not give a talk. Had I given a good talk, that would have increased the number of people who might have come up and talked to me, unbidden. But that would have required me to write a good talk about things that people wanted to hear about, and that is really hard.

Spoke to three different people who seemed to each embody a particular subtype of neurodiversity. Being in mathematics, you meet a lot of people who are Not Like Most People. Also being a mathematician, I have this propensity to categorize.

There were assorted nifty problems left lying about on the tables. So I picked up some of them to bring back to the office and share with my colleagues. Someone who looked like he was about 10 years old gave a really good talk, and I shared the problem that he solved with one of my colleagues. (And I’m not doing the dismissive thing of claiming that a college graduate looks like he is 10. This person really did look to be about 10 and was accompanied by his parents. There was an even smaller child who gave a talk. The smaller child was young enough that he still had that “little kid accent.”)

On my way from the conference to the airport to fly home, there was a fight on the train! A possibly-intoxicated passenger on the train allegedly disrepected another passenger on the train. A third passenger, unbidden, took it upon himself to defend the honor of the woman who had been disrepected. The fight was fighty enough that there was blood on the seats and floor after all parties had disembarked. I minded my own business and looked the other way for the duration of this altercation.

Returning to San Diego, we landed on 27 (of course, we always do). The cats survived under the able care of the catsitter. Even without a catsitter, the cats probably would have survived 60 hours without supervision, but it’s always good to have someone come by and make sure that nothing too stupid had happened with the water.

Today I almost caught up on all the emails from when I was gone and emailing all the people from the conference that I exchanged cards with. Tomorrow I’ll do the rest of the keep-in-touch emailing with people whose cards I don’t have. Also tomorrow I may finally do all of the stupid scrapbooking that I need to do in order to have work pay for my travel and conference registration. The hotel receipt is super-weird because the hotel’s computer system can not deal with special cases, but I suppose that handing a stack of paper over to the accounting department and hoping for the best is better than just paying $1500 worth of conference expenses.

If I can remember to bring in an old photo and scan it at work tomorrow, I may have more to say about some of the people who I talked to at the conference.