Fun Week in the Big City

So it was a fun week in the big city.  There was a big conference in my field here in town this week.  I spoke on Monday - a good panel, we ended up with about 30 people in the audience.

I attended a plenary session on poverty and seniors.  It was astounding, 4 people with doctoral degrees to tell and audience of 2,000 people and the message was, poverty is bad, a lot of older people live in poverty, we should do something about that.  Well duhh, tell me something I don't know.

I was in a session on end of life health care - one of my favorite topics.  One of the speakers said we are really bad at predicting death, doctors only get it right about 10% of the time - forecasting death within 12 months.  She said after 35 years of studying it she has come to the conclusion that "breathing is an old habit and most people find it hard to break."  I love a speaker that can make us laugh about death.

It is tourist season in DC, the cherry trees are in bloom, the school trips are in season and Easter is this weekend.  And DC being DC, it may be tourist season but they don't issue hunting licenses.  Tourists on the subway at rush hour are the worst.  School ground are even worse, a group of 50 students all think that they need to get on and off through the same door.  I heard a train operator lecturing them that all of the doors go onto the same train and all of the train is going to the same place, at relatively the same time, spread out and use all of the doors.  Only once in the past year has a train split in half while traveling - opps - that is not suppose to happen.