I've been to the Fall AGU almost every year since about 1989. But, lately I've gotten down on large meetings-I guess I want people to come to my poster and say how briliant my work is, and of course it does not happen, and I'm one of 8000 presentations, and I start to lose confidence and wonder why I am working so hard for something that pays so poorly. So, this year I am working with a student, who is presenting our poster Sunday morning, on faults in Santa Monica Bay. Lots of California structure in that session.

Actually, I'll probably go to meeting in the spring-I accepted an invitation to talk at the Pacific Section AAPG in Long Beach in May, and my wife will be going to Nice in April and I'm tempted to go-and say that the structure southeast of Istanbul includes thrust faults and compressional folds (everyone says they are normal faults and rollover anticlines, but they would be wrong, and I would be right).

So, I'm looking at the 10 pound Fall Meeting abstract volume, and being unproductive-my hard disk was failing so I have to spend about a week getting everything working again (I did not lose anything I needed, but just to get all the softwares running takes a while). Then, we have 6" of snow here, so I went with my daughter to go cross country skiing in a state park near here, and a cars brakes failed and it went through a Stop, and we skidded and piled into her-the other driver, my daughter, and I had soreness-in our case just where the seatbelts restrained us. I'm on blood thinner so it is lucky we did not hit harder-but I get to spend more time over the next week getting some major autobody work done. Then, the car was drivable, so we went and skied for 10 minutes, but my daughter's shoulder was sore, so I took her home, and the of course I had to go back and ski-nice snow, and a few rocks never hurt my $10 skis...Chris