Weight Maven

This is not going to be your average AHS12 wrap up post. I missed the majority of sessions (more about that later), so this is going to be just some of my highlights. Please check out the other wrapup posts for a lot more of the meaty details ;).

Getting to Cambridge. My flight up was smooth, but what I was most thankful for was being able to get an early check-in to the Charles Hotel. I’d woken up at 1:30A on Tuesday night and because of major league anxiety, could not get back to sleep.

As it turns out, I only slept about 15 minutes Wednesday afternoon, but it was nice to be able to have a comfortable place to relax and charge all the tech before doing set up Wednesday night.

Speaking of tech, I saw a remote control on the corner of the mirror in the bathroom and wondered what it was for. Turns out it was an embedded TV!

How I spent my days. I was the person responsible for recruiting and managing the awesome AHS12 volunteers. Others may have handled it differently, but I felt more comfortable hanging out at the registration/information desk schmoozing with attendees (like Lynda Frassetto who spent a half-hour chatting with me at lunch on Saturday!) and answering questions.

Here’s Tori Kean getting the registration desk ready. In the background you can see Vicky Vissering, Emily Dean’s sister-in-law. More importantly, she’s an ER nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital who used her triage skills to help manage the goodie bags early Thursday AM! These ladies were my buddies behind the desk and I really enjoyed chatting with them when we weren’t helping other folks.

When I wasn’t behind the registration desk, I was probably chairing an AHS session, which mostly meant introducing a speaker … and making sure the previous speaker got off the stage when time was up. So here I am making sure Paul Jaminet’s panel on new technologies wrapped up in a timely fashion.

I was assigned the task of drawing up the schedule for the session chairs and got to pick first. So if you’re wondering how I was so lucky to be able to introduce some of the AHS12 rock stars, well, now you know ;).

BTW, a public “mea culpa!” to Jimmy Moore for the confusion about his panel. We (the AHS12 chairs) had decided that panel moderators didn’t need session intros; the moderators would serve that role. But I offered to intro safe starches anyways, and thought Jimmy said no. Turns out he meant no, he’d intro the panelists and I thought he meant no, he’d intro the session. Anyways, aside from Ron Rosedale’s late appearance, that contributed to a little of the delay for that session. Sorry Jimmy!

And that’s pretty much what my AHS12 life was like. Rinse and repeat … until the very end.

Fun with Paul, Shou-Ching, Kamal, Shari and more. So there I was, after the closing event. I happened to have my bag with me as they had just packed up the registration desk. I bumped into Paul Jaminet at the back of the room and expressed regret that I hadn’t had time to talk with him more. So he says “What are you doing for the next hour? How about coming over to our place?”

So next thing I knew, I was hanging out with Paul, Kamal Patel, Shari Bambino, and other friends from Twitter/PaleoHacks on Paul and Shou-Ching’s rooftop patio!

In hindsight, I should have known I wasn’t going to make the Barefoot Banquet when Paul brought up the half-gallon bottle of Tanqueray! (I don’t think I remembered that gin was PHD-compliant ;).

I’m sorry that I missed the banquet and seeing folks there, but you’ll have to forgive me. This was our view!

Shou-Ching prepared an amazing spread for us: fermented veggies, Korean seaweed with rice, two different kinds of chicken wings, chocolate, guacamole, and more I’m probably not remembering. It was delicious and so much more than I was expecting! Thank you, thank you!

I’m not sure if it was polishing off a half bottle of Tanqueray or just what happens when you put a bunch of PaleoHackers together, but the discussion was fun, loud, at times contrarian (shocker, I know!) and went on for hours.

I felt a bit badly for Paul and Shou-Ching who, while very fun, are not at all loud and contrarian. They were lovely hosts and being part of that gathering was really *the* highlight of AHS12 for me!

Heading home. I had an early Sunday AM flight thanks to my work schedule. Having seen Jimmy Moore’s tweet about the line at Logan at 4:30A, I headed out really early. Yeesh. The lines were Thanksgiving-like!

According to a conversation I overheard, this was very unusual. And according to the tweet stream, it was airport-wide. I’m not sure if it was fallout from allegations of racial profiling at the airport or hundreds of AHS12 travelers trying to explain that little jars of ghee from their goodie bags were neither liquid nor gel!

Whatever it was, all I can say is that the $20 I paid to JetBlue for their “Even More Speed” service was worth every penny. While I spent about 15 minutes in line in the terminal just getting to the actual security check-in, I was able to bypass what looks like a half-hour or more of a wait getting through the regular security line! Big yay!

So that’s it in a nutshell. It was quite a bit of work, but all in all, I’m a happy camper now and looking forward to the next one.