Sunday Coffee

The busy week left little time for updating the blog, which was just as well since I wan't in the mood for posting. So as such, I'm going to take a few minutes this morning to go over the highlights of what has transpired since my last post.

My presentation Thursday morning for the regional laboratory staff went exceptionally well. This was a relief as I had spent a lot of time putting it all together (the primary reason why blog time was so scarce). I took some creative liberty with the design and by this I mean every so often I stragegically placed in the presentation an appropriate images from my Thailand trip. Though not usually an expected component of a professional scientific talk, the additional visuals nonetheless went over very well as it broke up the motonoty and more or less kept my audience awake. Regrettably, success has it's price and my manager (who caugh the latter half of my talk) requested that I give it again when the entire bureau meets at the end of April.

Ugh. I so hate presentations.

The other big event of this week was another presentation, but thankfully not by me. My university has a monthly President's Lecture Series and the guest speaker Thursday night's Natural History Lecture was paleoanthropologist Lousie Leakey, the latest generation of the long dynasty of Leakeys working on early hominid fossils in Kenya. Her talk was entitled "Origins and Evolution: In Search of How We Became Human" and was absolutely riveting. She touched on a number of topics including a little of the Leakey family history in Kenya, the discovery of assorted early hominid fossils, present discoveries (one as recent as three or four weeks ago), and the plight of indigenous peoples in Kenya and their struggle between traditional ways and modernization. The funny thing is that I almost didn't go as I was physically and emotinally drained from the week's events and as such didn't feel much up to going out. That certainly would have been a mistake.

Next up on the President's Lecture Series is Garrison Keillor at the end of April. I'll certainly go to that as I've long been a fan of NPR's :"A Prairie Home Companion."

Hmmmm......my coffee cup is almost empty. Off to Starbucks for a refill.