Another day that started quite early and I had to be at the Mariott Water Front Hotel before 7.30 for a breakfast meeting, organized by CSWP/FIAP (Committee on the Status of Women in Physics / Forum for Industrial and Applied Physics). People, as usual, were friendly and round-table discussions about general topics with Dr. Amy Harhold (speaker, from ExxonMobil), Dr. Andrea Liu (UPenn), Ms. Lorraine Sadler (UC Berkeley, BEC Expt), Joseph (Norfolk Univ) and Ms. Lisa Larrimore (Cornell, CNT Expt) led me to conclude the following: It’s a pretty small world we live in. Dr. Harhold is from Michigan, Ms. Sadler and Ms. Larrimore had quite a few things in common, in terms of academic decisions, with Dr. Liu. How did it matter to me, you ask? Dr. Raymond Shaw (Atomspheric Physics, MTU) collaborates with Ms. Larrimore’s husband, Nick Ouellette, a Cornell grad student working on turbulence. Though the talk itself wasn’t of much direct use, there were some advantages of attending it.

Apart from few talks, there weren’t many that interested me today. I spoke to Atomistix guys again and met Shivakumar, my friend from Bangalore, currently a grad student in Penn State. Lunch was a disaster - there was no problem with the food but service just sucked. We (Dr. P, Anil, Raghva, Raghavan, Kiran and myself) waited for one hour to be seated, then 20 minutes for waitress to serve water and take order (she probably threw that order away), we got regular pizza (but we had ordered large ones), my soup came after pizza was served and Kiran didn’t even get his pizza. Restaurant was Unos (Chicago based Pizza restaurant, supposed to be quite famous), and that was the last time I would ever visit it, atleast in Baltimore.

I visited Ritz Camera later in the afternoon and bought six different filters (I will probably return three of them tomorrow, as they are specifically used in B/W photography - Adobe Photoshop does that for me). Much of the afternoon and evening was pretty windy and I derived some sadistic pleasure upon hearing (from Santosh) that Houghton was being pounded with snow showers. Dinner was at the Banjara Restaurant (with Shivu and his friend, Venkat). This was the second occasion I realized the smallness of our world - he knew Santosh, Jitendra and Venkat (Cincinatti) After having eaten more than my usual and having walked a few miles through out the day, I don’t have enough energy left in me to work on my presentation for tomorrow. I guess I will do the easiest thing — sleep…