In the District

I'm currently up in the District of Columbia, aka Washington DC, a the annual NCURA conference. A few people have asked me how many years I've attended, and somewhat disturbingly, I don't really remember. My best guess is about 18. Today was a full day of meetings and discussion groups about exciting things like earmarking, indirect costs, electronic research administration, etc. We had a nice keynote address by Robert Bazell (NBC's science guy) to start the day around 8 am. At 6 pm I met a small group for dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant, and then headed for the hospitality suite. I just got back from my stint there that ran from 10 pm until midnight. Tomorrow will be more of the same, except that the evening will end with the annual NCURA party, after which I will stumble back to my hotel around 2 am or something. Hey, we call it "networking," so it's all good. All in all I guess I went through five or six glasses of wine, but it was spread out over a pretty long time, so I never felt very wasted. I doubt I can say the same for everyone who was there! The weather here has been pretty nice in that it's been unseasonably warm, but when I walked back to the hotel a little while ago I noticed that the streets were quite wet from a recent rain.