OK, so this week I ended up being a bit of a workaholic. I put in at least 9 extra hours. That's a whole extra day. (I'm hoping for comp time.) All in order to get a final paper ready to present at a conference that we co-hosted - "Food Security Capacity Building and Beyond: Excellence in Nutrition and Agriculture." (Cover at right with some freaking colors - really my colleagues are NOT a part of the BLUE MEN GROUP!) My role was to simply add the results from our Ethiopian workshop experience and tweek the Bolivian workshop results to reflect the newest data we collected. But it ended up being a lot more extensive than I originally anticipated (hence the hours spent burning the midnight oil...) But the paper turned out well, all 95 pages of it, and I got to present it at the conference yesterday. I finally had time to prep my slides on Wednesday afternoon, got a call from Tom our Health Director that night with some really important changes that needed to be made, requiring me to get to the office early on Thursday morning to adjust the presentation slides before I hustled over to the conference site. By the way, did I tell you it was a humid day. When I left my house I looked normal, but by the time I arrived at the conference, my hair was ridiculously curly and my face was dripping! And then the first guy who was supposed to be presenting hadn't shown up yet, so they asked if I wouldn't mind going first. (Fortunately he did show up at the last minute, so I could stop sweating and start breathing again!). I'm not the best public speaker, because I seriously dislike it, but once I got past the theoretically stuff and could talk from my own experience I starting getting into a rhythm - my "song and dance routine" as I call it. And by the Q&A time I was flying - they threw at least 12 questions at me and I was shooting back great answers left and right. And my boss Dave agreed - my best part was the Q&A time. People yesterday and even today said they really enjoyed my presentation. Wow! (The coolest part for me was getting invited to be 2nd author on the final paper. Since I never pursued publishing my MS thesis, this was the next best thing!)
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