I flew home yesterday after my week in Portland, and boy, was I glad to get home. A week is a long time to be gone from my kitties.

On Friday, after the conference ended, I managed to get over to the Portland Art Museum and saw the Rembrandt exhibit and some of the Asian art collection. Then the group had sushi (well, two of us had sushi, two of us chickened out and had teriyaki) at a complete hole-in-the-wall restaurant called Koji that was close to our hotel and had been recommended by the info desk. The sushi turned out to be passably good.

On the return trip, I took a controlled number of photos from the airplane this time. In fact, I wasn't going to take any shots at all on Saturday, and subsequently missed some really nice shots of downtown Portland in the sunrise. Silly me. In any case, I'm glad I got some good shots of Mt. Hood from the plane.

I went to the morning sessions yesterdaym during which I was feeling icnreasingly out of it. At lunch time I decided to go take a quick nap, but after I lay down my head started throbbing worse and worse and WORSE. I realized I was in a full-blown migraine, and was going to call my peers but when I got up to do so the pain was WORSE STILL. So I just lay back down and covered my head with a pillow and didn't move for 6 hours.

This was only my second migraine ever, and by far the worst. I wasn't sure that the first one was a migraine, but with this one there was no doubt. Mom gets them from time to time, so I presume it's just a function of getting older. On the other hand I've had both more coffee and, bizarrely, more pineapple this week than I can remember having, ever. Maybe it's a reaction to one of the other of those.

Today I feel much better, although still not 100%. I hope to go to the Portland Art Museum and get some sushi this afternoon/evening, but we'll see how that turns out.

Today was a very long day, even though we had half a day off from sessions. I led a group of four people to the Portland Zoo and the Rose Garden in the afternoon, and then came back for an unscheduled Grouper session which was very intense, and in which I met a lot of people which are involved with this work. So it's after midnight PST, which means coming back to the east coast will be that much more difficult.

In any case, here are my photos from the Portland Zoo and the Rose Garden, without much comment. I hope that they're enjoyable anyways. I really like Portland - it has a small town, friendly feel, and the traffic is remarkably light for the west coast. I wish we had gone to the zoo when it wasn't nap time, but it worked out okay.



I split out the Rose Garden stuff into a separate Flickr Set:

Today I took the technical track for the eduCause sessions, and I found several small items that we need to check on / document on the technical side, and also a few good ideas from other institutions for when we start doing entitlements / provisioning for services. So it was a useful day.

We went to dinner at the Heathman Hotel Restaurant, which came highly recommended as the chef is renowned. The food was quite good, especially the Dungeness crab salad, but the service was terrible. Nothing like a server who is both stingy and has a snappish attitude to put you off your food. It was too bad, because in general I give servers a lot of leeway since a lot of my friends are in the food industry, so I can sympathize with their hectic jobs. In any case, the general consensus was that South Park Seafood Grill was better on Sunday night.

One of my co-worker friends had a bit of a breakdown over dinner - this is something that had been building up for a while, clearly, and it finally came bubbling up. I could totally sympathize with this, having been there myself before. I can remember a couple of times in the .bomb era when I was under a lot of pressure and had impossible deadlines and was working 80+ hours a week when a negative comment or an immovable object would arise and I would go to the bathroom and sob my heart out. Then I would try to calm down and collect myself, and go back out and continue to try to slay the dragons. It's never easy to recover from those episodes, but sometimes they happen. And the best thing is to recognize for yourself how much stress you are really under and learn how to let off the steam earlier before it either explodes or implodes. I hope my friend will be able to use this situation to make some changes in her life, to help her cope better and enjoy life more.

Remember, there's more to life than work - stop and smell the roses once in a while. :)

The first day of the eduCause Shibboleth CAMP (and introductory seminar) went well.  It was completely exhausting, but in a totally different way from the JavaOne conference.  I wasn't busy absorbing tons of technical material, but in this case coming up with new ideas for how to approach our Shibboleth environment and potentially use it to solve some of our internal Identity Management issues as well.  Later in the afternoon, it was a fairly rude awakening to realize that we are really not very far along in our path to use Web SSO as fully as it should be used.  They had us go through a worksheet and say what we had and had not already done in our environment, and, well, there were a lot of NOs on that worksheet.  Finally, we had a 2.5 hour dinner (which was excellent, and the first time I've had steak since I started cheating on my pesce-veggie diet [on which I lost 10 pounds, so I better get back on it]) in which we discussed the issues we have with Grouper and its performance and user interface, and how several universities and the Internet2 group are going to collaborate to get things changed.  It was the biggest example of inter-institutional politics I have been part of to date, and at one point during the conversation I thought that it was going to fall flat on its face and dissipate.  But it looks like it will move forward, although time will tell the truth of that.

Anyways, I got back to the hotel room at about 8:30 PST, tooled around for a short while, and then crashed hard asleep.  After which I had a series of dreams which involved me riding on a bus that was being driven by my dad and had Nick Rhodes and John Taylor of Duran Duran as co-passengers.  [I don't even want to talk about the Freudian implications of that one.]  That dream was fairly involved, but suddenly I found myself in a dream where I was sitting in a room surrounded by a bunch of female friends.  I realized suddenly that they were here to visit with me because I had found out I was pregnant.  They were there to loan me their maternity clothes and such. I felt very confused and angry at myself for having gotten pregnant in the first place, realizing I must have done something foolish about birth control.  I felt that being a single mother was going to be a huge burden, and that I wasn't sure I could afford to have a child, either.  Then I started to wonder who the father was.  I knew immediately who it must be, but I couldn't think of when we had had sex.  But somehow I still knew it was his.   I pictured telling him about it and knew that he would be very displeased.  Then I woke up.

This is the first time I have ever, in my life, dreamed I was pregnant (that I can recall, that is.)  It was not a happy feeling.  I felt confused and trapped and in some way like I had done something shameful.  And yet, for some reason, I was quietly pleased about it.  Hrm.  I'll have to think about that.

I haven't analyzed several of the past few dreams I've had, but I'm planning to get back to them when I get some spare time and give some more analytic details about what they mean.  So please bear with me. :)

Today I got very little sleep before flying out to Portland, Oregon for the eduCause Shibboleth CAMP and Advanced CAMP that I'm attending this week. Since I have a lot of trouble sleeping on planes and I was tired and punchy from getting very little sleep last night, I took over 100 photos from the airplane. That, and I love the southwest. I have very fond remembrances from seeing the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert, the Cliff Dwellings and the crater at Winslow, Arizona from when I was 8 and we were living in Coronado, California. When I drove across country in 1995, New Mexico struck me even more as a beautiful, hard landscape, that was made softer than Arizona by the colors of sage, a dark pine sort of scrub brush, and the reds and whites of the sand. If there's anywhere I would live other than Durham, it would be Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The colors didn't turn out very well in the photos, but it was wonderful to see these places again from the air.

Once in Portland, I was struck by how lush and green a city it is, and how clean it seems in comparison to most big cities. The group from Duke had a lovely meal at the South Park Seafood Grill and Wine Bar and the conversation flowed nicely with the delicious entrees and excellent Oregon Pinot Noir we had. Ammendment: the wine was from Cristom Vineyards.

Click the Flickr stream for a slimmed-down version of all the pictures I took. Yes, I really did leave some out.



    "Patriotism swells in the heart of the American bear." - Fozzie Bear