My laundry waits patiently to be folded

Normally I don't experience strong emotional connections to places. But today when I arrived in cold, rainy San Francisco, all I could think was thank god for northern California. After enduring miles of walking, awful convention center food, and NHRA enthusiasts for three days, all I wanted was to be able to look around and see a mountain somewhere in the horizon.

I went to the PRI Tradeshow in Orlando with Ted & Nancy, which was a huge amount of fun (although the broken blister on my foot doesn't agree). One of the highlights was tracking down Claude to ask him a suspension question, which resulted in him learning my name (or at least my face) and promising me that he would remember me at comp. This may or may not be a good thing.

David talked to a whole bunch of people and got us tons of new potential sponsors, which is good because I'm not exactly the best at trying to convince people to help us out. We also went around distributing thank you cards to our existing sponsors, which they all seemed to appreciate.

Then there were the interesting people. At one point I was talking to somebody about possible sponsorship, and a few random guys overheard me and were very interested in learning about the FSAE program. So I ended up talking to them for a while and giving them my business cards. It was totally unexpected, but pretty cool.

Some of the guys from Auburn's FSAE team were there, and I ended up hanging out at their booth more than a few times. They were all really cool and super sweet. Nihal and I hung out with them after PRI yesterday night.

And of course I can't go without mentioning Pinstripes Guy. He was one of Claude's interns at OptimumG, and David was complimenting/making fun of his pinstriped pants after Claude's Thursday seminar. While it was mildly awkward and I didn't really participate in that conversation, Pinstripes Guy apparently remembered my face, because he said hi to me every time he saw me after that. It's one thing to smile, but it totally threw me off guard that he actually asked me how I was doing each time. It didn't help that his French accent was extremely attractive...

Now I have stuff from PRI strewn all across my bed, and a basket of laundry that needs to be taken care of. Time to get to work.