As many of you well know, I tend to have a rather ridiculously busy travel schedule in the summer months. This summer is no exception of course and while travel does tend to get in the way of thesising and RA work and my part time job and, well all the trappings of home, I do rather enjoy it — it would just be a lot easier if it were more spread out rather than all concentrated in a few months spate of time… oh well.
In any case I spent last week in Virginia Beach, VA for the 11th annual CKI Large Scale Service Project (my 9th) and the 56th CKI Convention. It was as usual a mix of fun, stress, business, and pleasure and much more. I spent a lot of time trying to work to encourage CKIers to fix problems (whether in CKI or in Kiwanis), catch up with old friends and newer acquaintances, and did actually get to enjoy the beach. One morning I walked for an hour and a half down the beach for example, and I did relax in the ocean for a bit (too shallow to really swim where I was, and I wasn't about to go too much further alone, it being the ocean and me knowing better — particularly as I'm supposed to set a good example and all that jazz).
The food was mixed. It being on the ocean I ate a lot of fish. But it being the United States, it was a mixed bag of awesomeness alternately with mediocre dishes. But no food poisoning this time, just vegetable deprivation on a day or two of my trip — so that wasn't half bad, really.
The hotel itself was decent — but the hallways were a bit narrow for a convention of our scale. Attendance was up from recent years however, and first time attendance seemed pretty good! I was also impressed that we had so many CKI members in attendance from Western Canada this time (disappointed with the attendance from the rest of the subregion but hey, you win some you lose some, right?
Audit prep at work is ramping up — we wrote our tentative August schedule this week, so hopefully that goes well in preparation. I really hope I can manage to not work TOO much in August due to having RAwork and thesis work to catch up on by then. Hopefully I'll get some more RA work and thesis work done this week actually before jetting off to Geneva.
Speaking of Geneva, I should go to the bank and pick up the currency I requested. Yikes!