cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hotel They make such a fuss over me here in Missouri. A small army of people have put themselves at my disposal these last few days as I've been working on this c@rp thing. Yesterday was a stunning success and I bagged all of the fish I could possibly have hoped for. In retrospect I should have kept more, though. They were literally jumping into the boat. The situation is exactly as advertised, which is rare. We brought the fish back to the g@me department research station and fileted them and started cooking them. I sat out back at a picnic table having a very long conversation with a c@rp expert. At some point I looked up and realized that there were about a dozen people who were just standing around in silence. For about 90 minutes I had this rapt audience that stood there and listened to every word of this conversation I had with the fish biologist. They were all either biologists, students or people who chose to work for this particular government agency because they have an interest in wildlife and conservation issues. So I suppose that this particular conversation would be of interest to them. The funny thing is that I never would have thought that anyone but me would have been interested in the utterly geeky things that we were discussing. Yet in retrospect, people had better be interested in them because we were talking about the subject matter of my next book that I'm here to work on. I honestly think that every one of those people would have paid for a ticket to sit in a theater and listen to that c@rp guy and myself having a panel discussion with a pair of microphones. This bodes well for the book. Last night I was introduced by a biologist to a journalism professor as "the leading expert on inv@sive species," which was jarring. I don't really think that this is accurate. The most you could say is that I have *broader* experience in the field with eradicating inv@sive species than anyone else in the private sector. Jenny wasn't able to come today after all, which came as a great disappointment. Proximity to her was the main reason I chose to do this trip here rather than in Illinois where my first offer of help had come from. Tomorrow I'm starting the drive back home. Into the hurricane, so there's no big hurry. I'll take a few days to do it. If it wasn't for the storm about to make landfall then I'd have left early this afternoon. Another expedition and more nights sitting around in a hotel room alone. I hate this part. Its very lonely up on the pedestal. 8:33 p.m. - 2011-08-26 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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