So the other day, I put together a package to send off to my pen pal in Washington. It’s sort of embarrassing, because it wasn’t like it was a particularly exciting package. It was just letters. Lots of letters. I cleaned out my desk and my stationery chest up in the office, and I found about a dozen or so unsent letters, dating back as early as 2003. That’s ancient history. I had a truly amusing few hours where I went back and re-read all these unsent letters, adding notes at the end of each, giving status updates on the stories I shared in them.

What’s really amazing is that I realized as I read through those old notes just how different my life is now compared to just a few years ago. It’s not just that I have a new job. I’m in a completely different place in my life now than I was when I first moved to North Carolina. I’m heading down an entirely different path, and my goals are entirely different. In 2003, I was heading down the path I had set for myself in 9th grade - I was going to grad school to earn my doctorate in neurobiology (admittedly, in 9th grade I hadn’t quite narrowed it down to neurobiology), and I would eventually land myself a combo teaching/research position at some university. Now, 4 1/2 years later, I’m only using the B.S. in biology as a resume-padder to show that I do, in fact, hold an undergraduate degree. And instead of pipettes, centrifuges, and immunofluorescence, my tools now are Photoshop, InDesign, and a Blackberry. My path is leading me deeper into the world of marketing and design, and I suppose I’ve left the world of academia behind. What’s surprising is how little it bothers me to have given up on that dream that I held for so long. But there you have it - I’m happy doing something I never once saw myself doing in all the years I was going through school.

So, speaking of the world of marketing and design… My job has landed me in Texas this weekend. It’s our annual National Sales Meeting, and as a member of the MarCom team, I got to help organize and run it. It’s nice, because while I interact with all the guys on the sales force constantly via email, I haven’t actually met very many of them, save for a few brief interactions at Graph Expo last September. This weekend has been a constant stream of introductions, most of them usually ending in something along the lines of, “Oh, you’re the one I’ve been emailing back and forth with about such-and-such.” Yup, that’s me. The faceless girl behind the scenes who gets all your marketing needs taken care of for you. :)

We’ve been staying at the Woodlands Resort outside of Texas. And aside from some rain on Friday, it’s been lovely. See how pretty it is? If you had to work through the weekend, wouldn’t you at least like it to be at someplace like this?

There are tons of patios, decks, and walkways that border the water that winds all through the resort.

There’s even a golf course on the grounds.

It’s been hectic, and even chaotic at times, and I’ve gotten relatively little sleep between the late nights and the early mornings, but it really has been fun. And when people get tired, they start to get silly. We certainly have had fun times. Take, for example, last night, when a bunch of us got together and put together centerpieces for the tables for the Awards Dinner later that evening. The group who had the banquet hall the night before us had these awesome fish bowls filled with glass marbles and little LED lights and flowers, and they looked amazing. We wanted to do the same thing for our own dinner, but when we inquired about getting them, we found out they were ridiculously expensive. So the woman who’s doing all the planning for this evening drove out to WalMart and bought the makings herself, and we all lined up assembly-line style and put them together ourselves. Trimmed the flowers, arranged the different colored marbles, stuck in the LED lights… laughing and telling jokes and stories the whole time.

And didn’t they turn out beautifully? A $75 centerpiece for pennies on the dollar!

There were also tons of raffles and giveaways during this meeting. My group, MarCom, had our own raffle where we gave away 4 $50 gift cards. One of the women I work with joked that she wanted to rig it so that she was all but guaranteed to win one of the prizes by stuffing dozens of her business cards in the bowl. As it turned out, she didn’t need to - she won the last gift card anyway!

And if you ever thought the world of big mail machines - inserters, sorters, scanners, etc. - was boring or dull, you would have gotten a kick out of one of the demos the software group did this weekend. They took one of the vision systems that scans barcodes and set it up so that the camera was in front of a screen playing Guitar Hero, and the hammers were placed in front of the various keys on the guitar controller. As the game played and the notes appeared on the screen, the system scanned it and told which hammer to hit when. As I heard it told, it got a perfect score on the hardest song set on the advanced level. Now that’s a demo they ought to do at the tradeshows!

I had hoped that I’d be able to get some knitting done on this trip, but as it turned out, I didn’t actually have time to do much of anything other than work, much less knit. I did, however, get a little bit done on the mindless scarf I started last week. It’s a simple scarf in a diagonal bias stitch that I’m knitting with the BFL that I spun up after Christmas. I love it. It’ll be a short scarf, but that’s okay - I’ve already got two very long scarves anyway. And it’s sooooo soft!

And since the shuttle takes me to the airport tomorrow at noon and my flight isn’t until 6:30 pm, it looks like I may get a chance to work on that some more while I wait at the airport! Fun fun.

Well, on that note… I have to be up way too early tomorrow morning, and it’s already been a very long day weekend, I think I’ll be heading to bed now. Tata!