San Diego, Again

We just returned from another road trip to San Diego. This time my mother, who is visiting for the month of October, came with us. Like last time, we had planned to leave on Friday afternoon. Like last time again, unexpected delays came up, (this time they really were unpredictable, and not related to Shreya) and it was quite late in the evening by the time we were ready to hit the road. This time however, we decided not to simply leave then. Instead we got an early night and set out on Saturday morning, at 4:30! This time, the stars were favorably aligned however, and we didn't run into any snowstorms or fog or major road work, and we arrived in San Diego around 8:00 in the evening.

On Sunday, Tom and I both gave talks at the INFORMS meeting. As a brief tangent from always reporting about Shreya, I should mention that this is a crazy conference. There are close to eighty parallel sessions! I don't have a good estimate of even the order of magnitude of the number of participants, and can't seem to find his information on the web, but one could see lots of participants milling around for several blocks around the convention center. The printed program is about the size of a telephone directory! When I mentioned this to my sister, she asked how one decides which sessions to attend. The answer is quite simple if unfortunate -- one just looks for ones friends. Annoyingly enough, some of the talks we were interested in were scheduled in parallel with our own. On the whole, the entire thing was rather a pandemonium.

Anyway, we both attended some sessions on Sunday and Monday, while Aai and Shreya hung out at the hotel, where Aai exercised Shreya (or was Shreya exercising Aai?) On Tuesday, Tom went to the conference site but spent the afternoon working with a collaborator instead of attending the sessions. Aai, Shreya and I spent the time in Balboa Park, where Shreya had fun splashing in the fountains and riding the tram. Tom joined us there in the late afternoon for about an hour, and then, in the evening, we began the journey back home. This time we were not so pressed for time as UNM had their fall break, so Tom didn't have to get back and teach. So we decided to take longer on the drive back, and take in some sights on the way. And that is just what we did, on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning and afternoon. More about it in another post.