(no subject)
Mar. 25th, 2006 07:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaA peaceful afternoon in San Francisco. Alex is napping hard, and Michael has gone off to investigate the hotel's hot tub.
We just spent a few relaxed hours with my aunts Debbie and Brooke, their 10- and 12-year-old sons, and my brother and sister-in-law. I think it must have been... seven years, I guess, since I saw Brooke. (Debbie's more likely to travel to family weddings.) It was great to catch up. I am a little ashamed to be surprised that the boys immediately took Alex under their wings, playing with her and supervising her for most of our visit. Not something I expect from boys of that age, but apparently the older one is already babysitting. It was nice to have extra leisure for grownup conversation.
The conference has been fascinating. This morning I went to a panel discussion on manmade and natural distasters, and what behavioral medicine can contribute. One of the speakers was the first person ever to systematically study how children respond to natural disasters... and that wasn't until Hurricane Andrew hit, in 1992. Apparently, at the time she did her research, some people actually thought that children wouldn't really react to something like, oh, fearing for their lives and having their homes destroyed.
I've also been to some excellent HIV programming, including a couple of talks in which big names in the field made reccommendations that we've been battling about locally. That was great and affirming, although probably not much practical help in getting them implemented.
Yesterday I played hooky for a few hours. We went to a sushi boat place in Japantown, which was a lot of fun. Alex frolicked with a bowl of sticky sushi rice, eating big handfuls and getting rice everywhere in the process. She loved waving at the boats as they went by. I had something I'd never seen before - shark fin and jellyfish nigiri. It was (a) delicious, and (b) fun to look at and eat. (I took a picture, which I'll upload when I get home.) Then we went to Golden Gate Park and walked along Stow Lake, feeding the ducks. In the evening,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
patgreene and brian1789 came over and we had a great picnic dinner in our hotel room. It was a lot of fun hanging out with them.
My brother and sister-in-law took me out after my talk, for an amazing dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant called The Slanted Door. Their menu was... oh my God. We had spring rolls with spicy peanut sauce, cellophane noodles with Dungeness crab, claypot chicken with a chili-caramel-ginger sauce that made me want to roll around in my plate, scallops with spinach and spicy black bean sauce, and sauteed asparagus with black trumpet mushrooms. The restaurant is in the old Ferry Building, and it had enormous plate glass walls overlooking the Bay Bridge. It was a transcendent evening.
...Oh yeah, my talk. It went well. There was some Lydia drama which I will not go into here, but my actual talk went very smoothly and seemed to be well-received. I threw out some results that baffled us, and someone in the audience said she'd seen something lke that before - not in a "you ignoramus, that happens all the time" way, but in a "yeah, I saw that and now we're doing a big study trying to figure out what caused it, here's my contact info" way. And the chair of my session, who is kind of a big deal, had very nice things to say to me, before and afterward. That was nice.
We just spent a few relaxed hours with my aunts Debbie and Brooke, their 10- and 12-year-old sons, and my brother and sister-in-law. I think it must have been... seven years, I guess, since I saw Brooke. (Debbie's more likely to travel to family weddings.) It was great to catch up. I am a little ashamed to be surprised that the boys immediately took Alex under their wings, playing with her and supervising her for most of our visit. Not something I expect from boys of that age, but apparently the older one is already babysitting. It was nice to have extra leisure for grownup conversation.
The conference has been fascinating. This morning I went to a panel discussion on manmade and natural distasters, and what behavioral medicine can contribute. One of the speakers was the first person ever to systematically study how children respond to natural disasters... and that wasn't until Hurricane Andrew hit, in 1992. Apparently, at the time she did her research, some people actually thought that children wouldn't really react to something like, oh, fearing for their lives and having their homes destroyed.
I've also been to some excellent HIV programming, including a couple of talks in which big names in the field made reccommendations that we've been battling about locally. That was great and affirming, although probably not much practical help in getting them implemented.
Yesterday I played hooky for a few hours. We went to a sushi boat place in Japantown, which was a lot of fun. Alex frolicked with a bowl of sticky sushi rice, eating big handfuls and getting rice everywhere in the process. She loved waving at the boats as they went by. I had something I'd never seen before - shark fin and jellyfish nigiri. It was (a) delicious, and (b) fun to look at and eat. (I took a picture, which I'll upload when I get home.) Then we went to Golden Gate Park and walked along Stow Lake, feeding the ducks. In the evening,
patgreene and brian1789 came over and we had a great picnic dinner in our hotel room. It was a lot of fun hanging out with them.My brother and sister-in-law took me out after my talk, for an amazing dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant called The Slanted Door. Their menu was... oh my God. We had spring rolls with spicy peanut sauce, cellophane noodles with Dungeness crab, claypot chicken with a chili-caramel-ginger sauce that made me want to roll around in my plate, scallops with spinach and spicy black bean sauce, and sauteed asparagus with black trumpet mushrooms. The restaurant is in the old Ferry Building, and it had enormous plate glass walls overlooking the Bay Bridge. It was a transcendent evening.
...Oh yeah, my talk. It went well. There was some Lydia drama which I will not go into here, but my actual talk went very smoothly and seemed to be well-received. I threw out some results that baffled us, and someone in the audience said she'd seen something lke that before - not in a "you ignoramus, that happens all the time" way, but in a "yeah, I saw that and now we're doing a big study trying to figure out what caused it, here's my contact info" way. And the chair of my session, who is kind of a big deal, had very nice things to say to me, before and afterward. That was nice.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-03-26 02:38 am (UTC)The Ferry Building is now the site of the big Farmer's Market, and the Saturday Market in the summer is a sight to behold.