*Cricket chirp*

Yesterday was our annual trip for the 6th annual DC-area alumni reception. As I mentioned before, this time we planned for it to take place in Baltimore so as to coincide with the SPIE Defense, Security, & Sensing conference that many of our alumni (many of them from DC) attend. You may recall that I also mentioned I was nervous... Turns out those feelings were proven. Well, let's start from the beginning.

• April 17, 2011: Visit DC, get ~40 people in attendance. Some people missed out because they were going to be traveling the next week for SPIE and wanted to spend their last weekend before it at home. 
• April 26, 2011: Host reception in Orlando for SPIE, get ~12 in attendance. Guests include many CIS faculty and students in town for conference.
• Summer 2011: Realize conference is in Baltimore in 2012. Given close proximity of the two alumni events, and the likelihood of DC-area CIS alumni attending SPIE, decide to combine events.
• Winter 2012: Plan Baltimore event. Decide on Sunday afternoon so that DC-area non-conference-goers can still come and not have to deal with traffic. Make event length long enough such that conference attendees just arriving in Baltimore can come. Reserve space down the road from site of conference.
• Spring 2012: Publicize event. Send more personalized invitations when initial registration turns out to be low.
• April 21, 2012: TWO people registered, with a handful of e-mailed maybes.
• April 22, 2012: Travel to Baltimore. Lousy weather makes travel uncomfortable. No one attends.

Wait, did I really just say that? That can't be right, can it?? Well, believe what you see, my friends. Nobody showed up. NOBODY.

It pains me to admit this. It makes us look bad. But I try to keep my blog honest, for better or for worse. This is definitely for worse.

What was it? Was it the timing? Was it the location? Was it the weather? What happened? The planning seemed logical. A number of us were involved, and we all thought it made sense. The drive from DC on a Sunday is 40 minutes - is that really so bad? What does this say about the worth of our annual reception that we put so many resources into? And what about conference attendees - were they not in town yet? What about our own CIS folks who were arriving on an afternoon flight at 1:10PM? We stayed until 4:30 just in case travel was delayed. We ended up giving our food away to the workers at the venue and any other patrons of the restaurant interested in trying something off the catering menu.

It wasn't all bad. I got to spend the day with my boss, one of our students, and our associate director of alumni relations, which was really valuable team building. We visited the aquarium (though it is probably 5th from the top on my list of best aquariums, but I don't want to sound like a TOTAL complainer - it was still good and had cool sharks and rays. But no touch tank? REALLY?). Our student's family made the drive from their home 2 hours away to join us, and they are absolutely wonderful people whom I always enjoy catching up with. The venue was phenomenal, from location to price to food. I almost beat Joe playing darts, and he's got, like, 4 decades of experience on me (not exaggerating at all... okay, maybe a little). So we all actually had a really good time... The only downside was, we didn't have anyone to share it with.

Our little group.
Sidenote: Could I have picked a more awkward position to stand in? Oh well, awkward was the feeling du jour.

Anyways, through a stroke of luck I was able to get onto an earlier flight home (Victory! standby list FTW), which was really good for me since I am still sick and walking around in the rain all day yesterday certainly didn't help. (Yes, I did think to bring an umbrella when I saw the forecast of 100% chance of rain; but since I was wearing a hooded rain coat I let our student use my umbrella.) I got home around 7:30, fell asleep by 8, and finally got a chance to try to sleep this bug off - which seems so simple but felt so incredibly fantastic.

So... Now what? I'm not sure what to do moving forward. Writing this blog entry and admitting my defeat was the first step. Now we are going to have to use this data to rethink our process in the future. But I'm not quite ready to think about that, yet.