May 30, 2006
I'm sitting at my laptop in a hotel room in Baltimore. It was a travel day. Drove 2 hours--horrible traffic--to the Detroit Metro Airport this morning, took a flight to Baltimore, and now I'm looking out my window over downtown Baltimore and Harbor Place. I can see the sign for Hard Rock Cafe, which oddly enough seems to be on to of a Barnes & Noble. There's a couple big boats in the harbor, a tall ship and some old freighter or something. It's hot, about 94 degrees.

I finally made it into the hotel by about 1:00 or so and was starving, so made the mistake of eating lunch--any port in a storm--at the Bisto300. Beautiful restaurant, actually, but a club sandwich, diet Coke and salad cost $25. Hard Rock's cheaper (though not by much), so my next free day--Thursday--I'm exploring.

Room is nice. Has a plasma TV, which will probably be wasted. Went down and did 30 minutes on the exercise bike in the health club. Did a phone interview for an article due at the end of this week.

Oh, this is for the Annual Meeting of the Association of Genetic Technologists. Though no longer a genetics tech, I'm the editor of their journal, so... here I am.

I'll keep you posted. TOnight's a party with the meeting planner who lives here in Baltimore somewhere. Tomorrow is board meeting (or perhaps, bored meetings), from 8:00 to 5:00. Thursday is basically free until evening when there's a welcome buffet, and the scientific sessions begin on Friday and Saturday with a variety of networking, meetings and luncheons, etc., stuffed in.

But right now, I'm trying to get acclimated and hope the headache doesn't start hold--argh, air travel.

Best,
Mark Terry