Ahhh… Spring break vacation in the middle of my final semester hell… what a blessing! While waiting at the Rochester airport, we met Melissa and another SPA that I have met for the first time, Dan. Our flight from Rochester to San Antonio begun at the wrong foot. The delay on the Rochester flight nearly caused us to miss the connection flight by 5 minutes. While we safely arrived in San Antonio, our checked luggages didn’t make it to the hotel until 1:30 morning.
I managed to wake up the following day to present my controversial poster at the SUGI conference. Surprisingly, my presentation was well received by several section chairs and other attendees. Perhaps, I was clowning around too much. Perhaps, I mesmerized the attendees with too many buzzwords. Or perhaps, I had a bottled water on my hand. One of the poster section chairs kept asking me to chat with “Art Carpenter” about my poster… not sure what that was supposed to mean, but I was rather lazy to look around for him. The result from poster presentation was sort of disappointing because I didn’t win the award I wanted. Anyhow, I was somewhat satisfied… with 4 SUGI conferences, 4 single-authored posters, a “2nd Place” award, an “Honorable Mention” award and a “People’s Choice” award.
This was our second visit to San Antonio… the first visit was about 7 years back. We revisited most of the places we had been before, plus a couple more new places. The trip to San Antonio would be incomplete without visiting all the missions. I overheard a conversation from a park ranger that the main reason these missions are closely located between one another is because if a mission falls due to the enemy invasion, the villagers could run to the nearby missions… just like the hungry wolf blowing down the piglets’ house one at a time. We rented a car and drove along the mission trail to visit the all the missions.
