Denver

I always feel excited to go home, but I have to say that just being in Colorado was good, even just being in Denver. I kept hearing people in my group talk about how kind people were in Colorado and how they appreciated their driving, etc. This made me proud to be from Colorado. Just one more reason anyway.

So I just got back on Saturday night from Denver. We drove there on Wednesday morning and had a good trip. I went to the American Evaluation Association conference this year and had a chance to give a couple of presentations while I was there. I stayed at the Comfort Inn Downtown near the 16th Street Mall and we were very comfortable there. One of the highlights of the hotel was the Workout Room. They had really nice equipment and the best thing of all was the cucumber water they had for after you were done. On Thursday I went to the conference and then That afternoon, Jennifer (a colleague from the Russian department that is in my research group) and I presented our evaluation/research project on the Foreign Language housing at BYU. The presentation went really well and people seemed interested in it, so that made us happy. That evening, we went to the business meetings (for the food mostly) but they really did have good refreshments.

Friday morning I went to the plenary session, but it was a little over my head, but that was okay. Right after it, I worked with two other colleagues, Steve and Mike, and we had a roundtable discussion/presentation. This was a good experience because the room was packed with people interested in using blogs and web analytics in evaluation. I felt like we had a lively discussion for the 45 minutes that we had in our time. I felt like everyone there really did have lots to contribute and they are interested in the topic. There were actually a lot more people in our room than I anticipated, so that was exciting. That afternoon we skipped out of the conference because we wanted to do some sight seeing. We really wanted to go to the Mint, but it was closed when we got there. But we did go to the Capitol and walked around a little bit and we also went to the Molly Brown house, so it was fun to find out more about her.

Friday night we walked down to The Cheesecake Factory, probably one of my all-time favorite restaurants. I ate a really yummy chopped vegetable salad because I wanted to make sure I had enough room to eat cheesecake. I ate some key lime cheesecake this time and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Saturday morning we got up and pretty much got packed and then we drove back to Utah and got home around 9. We had a good trip. Every trip to Colorado is good!