Quick Trip to Lafayette

For some reason the end of last year and the first of this year have been filled with travel. So far this year I have been to Denver, then a quick trip with Susie to St. George. This week I was on the road in North Carolina and Indiana. Next week I'll be in Albuquerque, followed by San Diego and Pasadena and finally Lincoln Nebraska.
This week was our annual Technical Data review for Pest Management. We met in Greensboro on Tuesday and Wednesday as a technical team to first, prepare our presentation, and then give the presentations to sales and marketing. For the first time in three years we were able to get through all of our trials in the allotted 7 hours.
Following the technical meeting I was on a two hour conference call with the Nature Conservancy to get an update on their Argentine ant eradication project on the Channel Islands in California. That triggered a lunch time meeting the next day with our regulatory department and our legal department. Always something fun.
Thursday I spent another 6 hours in a meeting with the Insecticide Portfolio review committee. Normally I join this meeting via telephone but since I was already going to Greensboro it was nice to join the meeting in person.
At 4:30 on Thursday I was on the plane on my way to Indiana. I arrived about 9 pm and was at Maren's house by 10:15 pm. The reason I was going to Lafayette was to be part of a graduate committee  meeting for a PhD candidate at Purdue University. Syngenta has sponsored some of his undergraduate research so they invited me to join the committee as an industry affiliate member. That meeting was Friday afternoon. It was much more casual than I expected. I was the only one not in jeans.

After the meeting it was home to Maren's to take everyone out to the HuHot for dinner. We even got the private party room in the back corner since there were 7 of us. We returned home to digest for a few minutes then we made 'Smores' on the kitchen table with mini marshmallows and Reeces Peanut Butter cups. They were surprisingly good.

Saturday morning it was computer games early outside the pantry where I was sleeping on the air mattress. Fortunately I was already awake when the gamers arrived because there would have been no sleeping after they started.

Tess hiding from the camera in her tent (or Yurt as Maren called it)

Maren and Josh had to leave early Saturday morning to go to a baptism. Than left Lance and I to play with Spencer, Cole, and Tess. Lance was a great father and constructed this tent in the family room for Tess and Cole. Spencer and Cole and I also spent some time talking to Susie on FaceTime.
All too soon I was back on my way to the airport to return home. Fortunately I spent the long segment of my flight in First Class.
I arrived at the Provo train station about 9:15 pm looking for a ride. I had texted Susie to let her know what time I would be in. I decided to call home and see if Susie had already left but she answered the phone. I guess she had forgotten that she had dropped me off on Monday and that I would need a ride home. She sent Kevin so she could finish her brownies.