40 days

In 40 days, all this conference stuff will be over. Whew!

Not really the proverbial 40 days, but it did find it an interesting coincidence when I added them up that today was the day I decided to blog the conference.

So, in 40 days, the interdisciplinary grad conference that we decided to launch this year, will be over - success or failure, it will be over. When I signed up for this thing, I underestimated the nature of the work. Not the amount, but the way it's been spread out and the length of time it seems to take to check any one thing off the to do list.

It of course doesn't help that I'm 3,000 miles away from all the other committee members. It also doesn't help that we've never done this before, so none of us are really clear on what needs to be done. And we spend a lot of time telling each other what we're envisioning... or at least I do. It seems to take forever to email ideas back and forth, waiting for people to read their email and have time to respond to it.

But it is coming together. We do have a really good group of people working together. And it's funny how my expectations for the group haven't necessarily panned out. Group members are responding differently than I expected them to, which makes for an interesting dynamic.

The biggest challenge is everyone's busy-ness. We've divided all the tasks into groups and everyone has taken on a chunk, but for some people, that means they're doing a lot during one short period of time (including all the post-conference stuff that'll need to be done!) It makes it challenging. So does the long distance. But I'm trying to be patient, and not count the number of emails I send trying to stay in the loop. Hopefully once it's all done, we pull this thing off and don't have to think about it till next year (which is whole different story right there)!