Well I'm back from San Diego, although in some ways it was tough to come back. If anyone has $8 million they are not using, I could purchase a home at the top of the tower on the right-hand side of this photo and use it as my summer home. It sounds like a good plan to me!

You can just see my hotel room in this same view from across the San Diego Bay on the shores of Coronado Island. Tough real estate to have view every morning from the patio of my room in the marina!

Now before you think this was all play and no work, it was a good CoSIDA conference. I always enjoy networking with SIDs from around the country. There are probably four or five new ideas I can steal.... I mean implement in upcoming media guides, on our web pages, and in the day-to-day operations of the office.

The workshop programs were good, as well. There was a tremendous writing session with Dr. Don Ranly, professor emeritus at the Missouri School of Journalism. I still keep his seven "C's" of writing on bulletin board from his presentation in St. Louis in 2000. He's humorous, intelligent, and brings incredible passion to writing. Hopefully he passed some of that along to me and the rest of the participants.

Our final planned evening in San Diego included a dinner aboard the USS Midway. The aircraft carrier was converted into a museum after being decommissioned. Our group had dinner just below the flight deck, then toured the vessel. Dain McKee, his lovely wife Becky, and I walked the decks, took photos, and even found time to ride a flight simulator. The museum also contains cockpit cutaways of many of the planes and helicopters that called the Midway home. Dain and I quickly realized there were more buttons, levers, knobs, and instruments in this helicopter nose cone that either of us wanted to try to deal with.

Now I'm back in the office, but that's a good thing. Although the view is not the same (there are no sailboats traveling through the construction that's going on outside my office window in the Kane House parking lot, and you can't see this view of the San Diego skyline from the deck of the Midway on a regular basis), the activity is picking up across campus. We are now less than 55 days away from the first official athletics contests of the year. Soon the footballs and soccer balls will be flying across the fields of the athletics complex, and the cross country runners will be preparing the arboretum for the annual Hokum Karem race.

So as much as I might like to wake up each morning to my view of the Bay, you can keep your $8 million. I'll still take a game, match, or sporting event at Wabash College any day!