Poland, Climate Presentations, and a thesis

Who'd have thought that just a few things could keep one so busy?

First, the fun stuff... took a 2-night, 1-day trip to Poland last week with a dozen of my classmates and 60 or so other schoolmates. We hopped on a ferry one evening, took an 8-hour ride across the Baltic, and landed in Gydnia, Poland early the next morning. Had a nice little breakfast on the ferry, then toured around Gydnia and Gdansk via foot and bus. My first time to eastern Europe, it was good to see a few remnants from the last world war -- and to be reminded of the devastation that it can cause. It was also good to see that people and places can recover from the atrocities of war, if not very quickly. Overall Poland is a delightful place full of people -- 40 million -- that have a pretty good sense of what's important in the world.

On to Climate presentations... gave my first "practice run" today to an audience much larger than I anticipated. I'd hoped for maybe 4 or 5 people -- just enough to put a little bit of pressure on so that I'd have to actually go through the slides from start to finish without stopping to change things -- which I always do when I practice alone. Instead of 4, 5, or even 8, however, there were over 20 people in the room. Thanks to all of them -- for grace, energy, and constructive comments -- hopefully it was a mutually beneficial experience for all of us in the room. I'm more aware than ever of the challenge of wanting to share so much information, but having a limited amount of time... I'm finding that I must continue to go back and pull things out of my presentation even though I feel these things make significant contribution to the overall point.

The countdown continues to the Iowa run... I'm up to 10 scheduled presentations over 7 days, and I'm quite excited about the opportunity to reach so many people, starting less than two weeks from today!

As far as the thesis goes... well, it's good! I'm finding that the three of us (our thesis is done in teams of 3) get along well and work quite well together. And we're pretty much kicking butt as far as having figured out the process that we will go through over the next month. And we're well on our way, having already done a first-round of several of our research methods... which has provided us with a better idea of what more we need to research so that we might go back and refine our work.

Oh - the thesis project... is about community food systems and how a community can work toward a sustainable food system. Interesting concept... and a bit scary when you start to dig into the food system... but I won't scare you with details today.

Time flies. And apparently I write slow... it's nearly midnight, and I'm tired. Soon I'll be able to write of another short trip: I head to Berlin on Sunday for three days away from Karlskrona, then return for a couple of days before heading to Iowa.