Arizona

I was at a conference in Tempe from Thursday to Saturday, where it was between 70 and 80 degrees. I hadn't realized how much I am ready for warmer, sunnier weather...
until the sunshine warmed my body
until I had to put my sunglasses on
until we decided to each lunch outside....
Now, I'm back in dreary Portland and I'm especially hating the weather. And my sunglasses are back on my desk, not to be used for a while, I'm afraid.
The conference was great because I got to see a couple of good friends. I talked to a colleague who teaches at Michigan State. In her class this semester, her grad students are giving presentations about research articles. One of mine was among that list and the presenter kept saying "and then the dude said...", referring to me. She had to interrupt him to clarify that I'm female (which the students would've know if s/he'd read the short bio at the end of the article) and that it's inappropriate for a presentation to refer to the researcher as "dude". Kinda funny.
I gave 2 presentations, which were well attended (even the one on Saturday afternoon!). One of the presentations I went too was rather bizarre though. There were 3 presenters, 1 professor with 2 of her PhD students. One of them gave a very brief into and then played a recording of their presentation!!! We saw the Powerpoint presentation and heard their recorded voices while all 3 of them were just sitting in the front of the room. At first I thought that one of presenters was not present and had recorded his/her portion of the talk. What's the point of going to a conference if you're playing a recording!? Afterwards, somebody was speculating that the professor decided to do that because both students were non-native speakers from Asia, who might not have been comfortable giving a presentation in English. But if that's the case, she's not doing them a favor.
On top of that, the presenters did not speak extemporaneously but read their presentation, which is highly unusual in my field, even frowned upon. I tune out when somebody reads something to me. After all, written language is usually too complex to be processed in an auditory way - it's meant to be read. Now here's the kicker: After the presentation, which was a critique of most of the research in the field, the professor got up and started reiterating that point in a very angry tone of voice. Great if you're passionate but that tone was highly inappropriate. Maybe she was annoyed that nobody was paying attention but who can blame us. This professor teaches at an institution in this area so I'm just praying that she won't get selected to review my tenure file. If she thinks most research on computer-assisted language learning has been crap, I'm sure my review wouldn't be favorable.