Dateline: Portland, Oregon –
This is the last update from Portland. I shall be heading back to Seattle tomorrow and will be there for a few days before returning to Alabama. Today wasn’t terribly exciting. A bit of a repeat of yesterday. Breakfast, Uber to the convention center, meetings until mid afternoon, a nap and then a dinner meeting celebrating that my colleague, Kellie Flood, was named the American Geriatrics Society’s clinician of the year.
Today was definitely old home week as I ran into all sorts of colleagues from my past at various points. Deborah Francis, Caroline Stephens, Calvin H Hirsch, Tomas Griebling, Holly Richter, Karen Miller and more. The sessions were fine with occasional nuggets of good information among the academic double speak. I spent some of my down time jotting some notes for what’s going to become an essay or a book chapter on how the US health system isn’t ready for what’s about to happen to it as the boom continues to age. I was going to work on it more tonight but two Tom Collinses have put paid to that idea.
Kellie’s party was held in a sports bar across the street from the convention center. I arrived to find it jam packed with Millennials in red and black getting ready to cheer on the Blazers. We were in a private space in a sort of loft but the combination of the UAB Geriatrics folks against the rowdy and somewhat tipsy young people made me feel like I had wandered onto the set of some film I didn’t especially want to see. The drinks were decent, the food was edible (other than the quinoa salad – that was a mistake on someone’s part), and it was nice to chat up some people I hadn’t seen for a while. Now I’m back at the hotel and rewatching The Battle of Winterfell on Game of Thrones. I’ve turned the brightness on the hotel TV ways up and, with that, it’s possible to see everything fairly clearly.
Can’t think of a good story at the moment and the cocktails are fogging my brain so I’m going to sign off now. More musings to
Life, The Universe, and Everything 