ACHA Conference, Philadelphia, May 1st - 3rd
Written on May 16, 2008
a couple weekends ago i got to haul myself over to the philadelphia airport marriott to attend the Adult Congenital Heart Association’s 2008 conference. while there i got to sign books and take pictures of the conference attendees. signing books is a weird thing. i never know quite what to say; it’s too easy to fall into the impersonal and i’m always fighting the urge to write inappropriate or nonsensical things just to see if anyone’s actually paying attention.
it was an eventful trip, even before i got there. on my layover from pheonix to philly i volunteered to sit next to a woman named filomena who had pretty severe muscular dystrophy. having only flown jetblue recently on cross-country flights, i was bored without a TV at my seat, and filomena made the flight a lot more interesting. she was a great lady, and had lots of stories. she was coming back from a voters with disabilities conference in phoenix. she started getting symptoms of muscular dystrophy at age 16. first it affected her balance, then slowly spread. now, in middle age, she’s confined to a 500 pound high tech motorized wheelchair. still, she had great spirit and made the flight a whole lot of fun. it was allegedly my responsibility to help her out in the case of a crash, but luckily that didn’t prove to be necessary.
also, while i transfered planes in phoenix, it seems that my light case did not. so i was a bit panicked for a while there as southwest took about eight hours to figure out where they put all my photo gear. everything ended up all right in the end but with no apologies or acknowledgement of fault from the airline, of course. they even knocked down their baggage allowance (used to be 3 bags) so i ended up stuffing all my clothes for the weekend in my light case, too. it would’ve been highly inconvenient had it not shown up eventually.
click on the link above to get taken to a page to see all the rest of the photos. my deepest gratitude and thanks and apologies to the illustrious and talented mr. jonathan saunders for not grumbling too much when i blatantly stole his lighting rig. it’s near impossible to fly with a giant roll of backdrop paper, and his setup is the most portable thing imaginable, which is great since i’m a scrawny guy in the first place.