A Busy Week

Hey Everyone,

Been a little while since my last blog but just wait till you hear about my week! I flew to Buffalo, New York on Wednesday, and drove from there to Kitchener in Toronto on Thursday to give a talk at the TEDxWaterloo conference there. The next morning I went into the Crossroads Studio in Burlington to do a few interviews, then drove back to Buffalo where I was staying with my mom's aunt and uncle.

I spent the next day with my cousin Heidi and her hyperactive lab puppy Sophia :) The next day I spent with my other cousin, Gretchen and drove back over to Canada to see Niagara Falls. Next day I hopped on a plane and headed back home, got in that night and the next day headed off to Santa Paula where I was working as the still photographer on a shoot for a Dolby commercial. I went to bed around 1:00am and was back up at 3:00am that morning to get over to the tiny Santa Paula Airport and get started. I was picked up before the end of that though because I had to go to school!

Yep, at the end of it all I still have to do my schoolwork. I'm back home now taking a break from studying for some pretty gnarly tests I've got next week so that I can write a blog :) So I really haven't forgotten about you all! Its taken quite a bit of caffeine to get through the past week, but it has all been really fun.

The TEDxWaterloo conference was pretty much amazing. I've done a few different conferences but this one really didn't sound like anything I had done before so I didn't know what to expect. There were about 900 people there, definitely the largest amount of people I have ever spoken in front of before. For the most part things went well, all the speakers were interesting, I met a lot of neat people and my talk went pretty well. I think my talk could have been better which is bugging me a bit... oh well, practice makes perfect, and I'm definitely getting some good practice in.

The two interviews I did went well. They won't be airing until April 18th though, and just in Canada. Seeing Niagara Falls was pretty cool. Of course it was pouring rain, there was quite a bit of snow around, and it was all of 20 degrees out... but still, it was amazing seeing that. I managed to forget my camera there though, so sorry bout the phone camera pictures.

The morning I left to fly home it started snowing! It snowed a few inches by the time I left for the airport, too bad there wasn't enough to build a snowman... Anyway, my flight ended up getting delayed for about an hour, and it was looking like I might not make it to my connecting flight in Detroit, but luckily they held the plane and so back to sunny, warm California (or so I thought). I got off the plane here and it was raining.

The day after I got home, Monday, I spent most of the day trying to finish up homework, but I started researching for a paper I was writing and it was so interesting I ended up working on that until I got picked up to go to the airport where the commercial was going to be filmed. In general, I dread flying, but I suppose thats because up to this point I've mainly flown in big planes where I'm forced to sit relatively still for the upside of 5 hours, not the most fun thing ever. But the son of the lady who's hanger was being used for the shoot offered to take me up in his little Piper Cub and that was seriously fun. I mean I didn't think there was anything that could ever come close to sailing, but that got scarily close.

We all got to bed pretty late, but call time the next morning was 3:00am so all had to be out there starting on setting things up. It was a fun day, there were a lot of neat people all working on it, and getting to photograph the whole thing was a lot of fun. I've always liked photography, and its pretty cool getting opportunities like this to really work on it.

Around 12:00 my mom came and picked me up, and I headed off to class... I had hoped that I would get to stay through the whole thing, but I guess graduating from high school is pretty important, as painful as it might be right now. I have standardized testing coming up next week, so that should be fun... (note sarcasm) but all in all it has been a very fun and eventful past week, and a half. Now its time to get back into the books.

Abby