San Diego Bay

24 March 2010

It's a crazy week! I'm attending two conferences, a meeting on "Air Pollution and Health" in San Diego and a special symposium on indoor air chemistry at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco. Ingrid and I flew to San Diego Saturday morning so I could participate in board meetings of the American Association for Aerosol Research (the sponsor of the SD meeting).

After attending the SD conference on Monday during which I presented a research paper, I flew to SF so that I could present a research paper at that conference at 8:30 Tuesday morning. I then flew back to SD arriving Tuesday late afternoon so that I could attend the rest of that conference!

On my trip from SD to SF and back, I had several "small world" moments. At the San Diego airport, I saw our friend from the East Bay, Karen, who had been down visiting her father. Then, as I was waiting to board the plane, one of the deplaning passengers was Dane, a professional acquaintance from Sacramento. (Okay, not so surprising, he was coming to the conference.)

Then, as I was riding BART to Oakland, at one of the downtown SF stations, Brett, a research collaborator and former student boarded my car.

The final incident was the most peculiar. Shortly after I boarded the plane in San Francisco, the young woman seated next to me nudged my arm. "Excuse me, I couldn't help noticing your name on your boarding pass. 'Nazaroff' was my maiden name," she said. Convinced that we must be at least third cousins or something, we spent ten minutes recounting our respective family histories.

Although we couldn't connect the dots, there was definitely a link. She's of Molokan heritage and grew up in Santa Rosa but now lives in San Diego. Her grandparents came to the US from Kars via Mexico, which is not so different from my own family's story.

I didn't have a lot of time to enjoy San Diego this week. But I did manage one long walk with Ingrid along the waterfront. We made it to the Midway aircraft carrier and saw "The Kiss," a giant statue commemorating the end of WW II and San Diego's connection to the armed services.

Along the walkway are a large series of whimsical "street tree" art pieces; the middle three photos show a few samples. The one just above with the double helix is known as the "Chemis-tree."