Back in T.O.

After successfully spectating at the US foreign relations history conference on the weekend (Thurs.-Sat.) I spent Sunday in DC proper with E. We took in a Nats game---a nice way to ease out of conference exhaustion. And, I survived my night in a hostel. It was totally fine. And last night, on the plane ride back to Toronto, I got an awesome view of Niagara Falls. Beautiful.

This is a disjointed post. Oh well.

Anyways, the conference was pretty good. The venue sucked rocks, though---suburban Virginia, in a faux fancy hotel-conference centre, far away from downtown. I have no idea what the organizers were thinking. I know they did their best under the circumstances, but hopefully this won't happen again. It would have been so much better if the conference had been held at a university or downtown DC. That way, there would have been things to do and places to eat after hours. This way, we were pretty much stuck. Good thing lots of Americans have cars and could drive us out to places if we asked them nicely!

It was nice to hang out with HD outside Toronto, get to know E a lot better, and meet grad students from other places who work on similar(ish) topics. There were some people I met last year who I caught up with, and profs I reminded of my existence. It's hard to listen to papers, but all in all, I think it was a useful venture for me. I quite like this crowd, grad students and profs alike, though obviously not everyone is marvelous. Next year's conference will be at The Ohio State University (yes, with a "The") in Columbus. I'm looking forward to it!

Many thoughts on the weekend, but I'll mull over them to myself for now. I do want to point out that out of the 7 people from U of T (5 grad students and 2 profs) there was only one man; the rest of us were female. This was quite remarkable considering the nature of this subfield, which is dominated by men. It's totally an old boy's club, but not necessarily in a bad way . . . I hope.

Should get back to work on my dissertation at some point tonight. It will be nice to reacquaint myself with my dead guys. ;-)