Salt Lake City

Disclaimer: This blog post is not about Adelaida. I may mention her a few times in passing, but the story here will not revolve around her. Feel free to stop reading now if you like.

When I set up this blog a few months ago, I vowed to keep it up with frequent posts--my goal was an average of two posts a week. Looking over the blog now, I see I've only written three posts in almost four weeks! It isn't that I don't have anything to write about, but rather that I can't seem to find the time to write. With Adelaida, chemistry, work, rental properties, travel, visitors, cleaning, cooking, laundry, and so much more to keep me busy, taking ten minutes to write a blog post has been hard to justify. For that, I apologize to you, my faithful reader!

One of the things that has kept me so busy for the past month or so has been preparing for the American Chemical Society (ACS) national meeting. The ACS is the nation's largest society for chemists; they hold national meetings twice a year and generally attract 12 000 to 20 000 attendees for each meeting.

This year, my advisor's PhD advisor (my academic "grandfather") was being honored by the ACS for his "distinguished service in the advancement of inorganic chemistry" and my advisor put together a symposium within the national meeting to celebrate the award. The other grad students in our lab and I saw this as a great opportunity to travel to Salt Lake City, to present our research at a national meeting, and to meet people who might be interested in giving us jobs one day. So, our entire lab (my advisor, the lab's staff scientist, the lab's postdoc, and all five grad students) traveled to Salt Lake City for a week of chemistry lectures, posters, and discussions.

Not wanting to leave a three-month-old baby at home for a week, I took Adelaida with me, and my mom met us in Salt Lake City to babysit for Adelaida while I went to the conference. I won't bore you all with the chemistry details, but did have a fabulous time, including two great poster sessions and several discussions with people who were interested in the research I presented ("Computational Insights into Palladium-Hydride Bond Polarization and Molecular Oxygen Insertion").

I was a little apprehensive about driving 650 miles with a baby, but it actually turned out to be quite easy. My friend Diane, who is also the post-doc in our lab, bravely agreed to travel with us, and we took a leisurely two days to drive up to Salt Lake City and two days to drive back. Adelaida was an angel in the car, falling asleep within two minutes each time we put her in the car. Acutally, the trip was going so well that on the second day of driving to Salt Lake City, we stopped by Utah's Arches National Park for a couple of short hikes around the arches, which were absolutely beautiful.

Highlights of our time in Salt Lake City included:

Dinner on Saturday night with the entire group, at which our waiter Adam serenaded Rick with an impressive rendition of a song that wasn't "Happy Birthday."


Touring Temple Square. The weather wasn't the best (rainy-snowy, cold, and overcast), but the grounds were beautiful and the tour was interesting.


Driving out to Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake, where we tasted the water (yup, it's salty!) and had a close encounter with a group of American bison.


All in all, it was a great trip and made me much more confident that I can successfully travel to Indiana with Adelaida this weekend.