Webb delivers the gospel at the Ocean Data Tools Tutorial

With apologies to Tom Lehrer, I think that’s the most concise summary I can muster at the moment. RVTEC was as intense a conference as I’d anticipated, with me and my co-conspirator Webb in the thick of things. A little less than a decade ago, I first attended as a wide-eyed groundling, a landlubber who’d only once dipped his toes into blue water and was gobsmacked at sheer mass of institutional experience and technology behind sea-going computer technology.

This time, Webb and I not only led a packed-room session on the ins and outs of the systems we’ve developed, we were asked to provide a half-day soup-to-nuts tutorial for ship operators who want to install what seems to rapidly be becoming the de facto shipboard data acquisition system for research vessels. It’s been a heady climb – gratifying, but also exhausting, and this past week felt very much like the punchline to a lot lot lot of hard work.

I will grant that it wasn’t all running demos and fielding technical questions at every turn (or dodging them because I really needed to make it to the bathroom at least once between all those sessions). A day in I got a call from two of my favorite young people from back home – Miller and Ellie. They were Kateen’s students at Compass Rose Farm before launching into a geography-defying series of moves a year or two ago. Somehow they’d managed to move to White River Junction without me noticing, then saw my little photo spread of their town in an Instagram post and decided to call me up. How could I not play hooky for a few hours to join them for a walk through the New England leaves?

But the rest of the time it was talks and talking and listening and asking and demo’ing and trying to get a bit of sleep in the interstitial moments. Upshot: I’m pleased with the reception we got, and the direction the community wants us to go from here – couldn’t possibly ask for more.

I did finally manage a bit of tourism my final night in Portsmouth. I’d been in town for most of a week and still hadn’t actually had any seafood (assuming you don’t count the conference-provided tuna sandwiches on Thursday), so took the 15 minute walk across Memorial Bridge to Maine to get a buttered lobster roll and cuppa chowdah. Er, chowder. Why? Because I could. Again, worth it.

Then a couple of days catching up with old friends in the Boston area (appropriately, I’m writing this in a café in Harvard Square not far from where Tom Lehrer taught math and political science when he wasn’t musically skewering deserving souls in the global and national geopolitical headlines. If you can’t sing along with at least one Tom Lehrer song, do yourselves a favor and educate yourself on the mid-20th century by binging on the YouTube channel or Spotify list. Or better yet, buy some of the actual vinyl it was first recorded on.)

Once a rocker, always a rocker – Hinge lead guitarist Andy McKenna back in 1982, and today with wife Tomoyo, opening a School of Rock franchise in Nashua. Yeah, that’s me in the back with all the hair. And yes, Chris is wearing goth makeup.

So, that’s done, and I’m rewarding myself with a bit of a break. This past month of prepping for the conference has been rough. This past year of scrabbling to provide more farmer housing at Natembea while juggling all the other responsibilities of managing the farm and providing for the seven young farmers who depend on it has taken a bit more out of me than I had. So I’m going to take a few weeks off before heading back to the left coast and getting back to work. I am hoping to get a bit more recreational writing done as part of the rejuvenation process, so I hope you’ll be able to follow along.

Watch this space!