Friday, April 24, 2009

OK, I'm back from vacation!

That's what I get for not updating my blog more regularly: people are still asking me if I'm enjoying my vacation. Actually, I've been back for almost 2 weeks. And yes, thank you – I had a splendid time. First of all, I got to hang out with my dearest friend Robin and celebrate the silver anniversary of our friendship, as well as (belatedly) her graduation from the Mills College MBA program last spring. That in itself, as we say, would have been Dayenu!

But on top of that, I also had the pleasure of:
(1) Hiking on beautiful Mt. Tam on a gorgeous, sunny day with
Ken Homer, a smart, funny guy who
knows more than most about one of my favourite topics: how to convene great conversations that make things happen;
(2) Getting a tour of
The Grove from David Sibbet and being invited to play with his cool Wacom tablet!
(3) Spending a delicious afternoon in the company of three brilliant graphic recording colleagues, Julie Gieseke, Mariah Howard and Leslie Salmon-Zhu. We had all kinds of plans for what we would do that day, but wound up just sitting and talking, talking, talking...and laughing our heads off in between all the talk. It was such an inspiration to hang out with these women and share stories, questions, ideas and giggles, and I only wish I could do this regularly!

So now it's back to normal life – whatever 'normal' is in my world. One piece has been to clean up a whack of photos I took of charts I produced for the PNCIMA Forum, a conference to help develop an integrated approach to oceans management for the Pacific North Coast Integrated Management Area (PNCIMA). Between the volunteer graphic recorders and myself, we generated over 20 charts – that's a lot of cleaning up! The charts from the plenaries are now done (yay) and I'm working my way through the breakout sessions. Here's one of the plenaries as a teaser – you can see the rest of them on the PNCIMA website.