I love reading friends’ blogs, especially when they involve some great sounding food. However I never really enjoy when people share the basics of their trip, it’s like devoting an entire post about the regular bread and butter served and not even mentioning the ostrich stew main course. I am talking about that general information about a new landscape that could be more easily expressed by WIKI page. Well I looked all through Wikepedia, and there was no information regarding the UK 2012 Physiology Department Retreat…I know I was shocked too. So I think we just have to bear through this if we ever want to get to the main course.

After a two hour drive, we reached the 4-H Convention Center and hit the ground running. I quickly loaded up on caffeine; I would need to be at my best if I was going to attempt to keep up with this crowd. I found an itinerary and tried to acclimate myself to the events to come. It seemed like most of the time before lunch would be spent in a lecture type of environment, so ran to reload on caffeine. To give you a sense of the itinerary the list included:

• Welcome, by the Physiology chair Dr. Reid
• What Genetic mouse models are available in Physiology, by Dr. Satin
• NIH focus on Translational Studies, by Dr. High
• Presentations on equipment like Ca⁺⁺ imagers, by Dr. Frolenkov

The list of topics seemed so abstract to me and it further reminded me of the academic level to which the scientists that I work with are held to.

As I tried to mask my gleamed and confused stare, which can only be described as the eyes of a kid on their first day of big-kid school, I looked over the rest of the itinerary. To my luck, the rest of schedule included things like Corn Hole and several breaks with food, where I got to ignore titles and just talk and meet some pretty great people.

You see, that didn’t taste too bad. Now onto….