Eclectic Echoes

Last week was very busy for us here. I volunteered to help out one of the people at the University who was in charge of organizing and putting on the NSA conference and the Benthic Ecology Meeting which were held back to back in Providence. Ostensibly I was supposed to be there primarily for IT support, but ended up helping with a variety tasks from stuffing bags helping people overcome issues with their presentations, to making lunch runs. Truth be told it was exhausting, but very fun – of course now I am paying the price for missing a week of school and school work…but it was worth it.

The organizer of the conferences knows Johann’s love of science and was very generous, providing Johann and Tammy with passes to get into the event and attend talks. As a family we attended a number of the talks, but the whole family ended up volunteering behind the scenes, stuffing programs and helping hand out newsletters, sell raffle tickets, etc… On Thursday the closing NSA evening event and opening Benthic Ecology Meeting event was a viewing of the IMAX movie Volcanoes of the Deep Sea with opening introduction by NSA member and deep sea biologist Richard Lutz. Richard also had a 20 minute question and answer period afterwords with several questions from the few kids in the audience including a pair of insightful questions from Johann.

We all had great fun, especially meeting some of the wonderful people involved in the meeting and attending it including Kathy Johnston, Richard Lutz, Sammy Ray, Roger Mann, Ken Chew and many, many others.

Johann and Tammy were invited back by everyone to the Saturday evening event to close the Benthic Ecology Meeting – a Beach Party in the hotel ballroom. Johann had a blast with playing volleyball with all the scientists and grad students. It was great fun and hilarious to watch the beach balls fliying into the chandeliers. (My legs are still killing me from all the running and diving.) They also had “Benthic Twister”, limbo contests, a Hawaiian shirt contest and a hula hoop contest. Who knew Tammy could hula hoop for hours straight?!

The highlight of the evening however for Johann was his receiving a certificate of appreciation and participation from the organizer. He had a photo taken with all the volunteers as he received his certificate. We will hopefully be able to get a copy of the photo soon to post. The certificate is now going up over his study desk. As one of the PhD students said “Wow, he’s gonna have a better C.V. by the time he’s in high school than I have now!” Heck he’s gonna have a better one than I do!!