Day 2- Clearwater Beach FL

It is official. I am a restaurant snob. My travels in the last few years have allowed me to eat at some fabulous restaurants. I always check out Trip Advisor for the best recommendations and I have never been steered wrong. (note: last night's meal at Crabby Bills did not appear on the Trip Advisor top 5 list for the area, and compared to tonight, I know why). Tonight I ate at the Island Way Grill. YUM!!! I started with a house salad (lettuce, carrots, jicima, cucumbers, pumpkin seeds and rice vinaigrette) and a baguette with butter. For the main course I ordered the sea bass. This is the first time I have eaten sea bass, but it was to die for. It was tender, moist, and almost melted in your mouth. It was topped with crab and shrimp. On the side I had wasabi mashed potatoes. I couldn't really taste any wasabi, but they were really tasty. Of course for dessert I had to try the key lime pie. It was light, fluffy and just a little bit of tang, with a couple of dollops of whip cream. The crust was made of macadamia nuts. The crust was probably the only thing I didn't like-- it was too thick, so I just ate the filling. A perfect meal.

Overall, today was a little sureal. I had lunch with a group of people that I have admired from a far for years and read everything they have written. And here I was having lunch with them. I'm still not sure how I got invited. But it was fun to sit next to Nancy Lee, the author of a textbook I use, and shake hands with Mike Rothschild, who I knew about since graduate school when Gary Bamosy, my favorite marketing/consumer behavior professor, gave me an article that Rothschild wrote.

Following lunch I was a moderator at a breakout session. One of the first presenters was a young woman from the CDC e-health team. I look up at the screen only to notice my name cited as a reference from an article I wrote with colleagues in 2008. Wow. That's me. Someone is citing me. That was cool.

Earlier in the day I ran in to Jamie Fraize. I met her a few years ago when I went to CDC to do a health communication training. She reintroduced herself, though I remembered her. She proceeded to tell me that an article I had written about using behavior change theory in social marketing had influenced a project she had done. Wow. Something I wrote actually made a difference? This is the article that Kelli McCormack Brown inspired me to write back in 1998.

The day ended with time at the beach. It was miserably hot and humid earlier in the afternoon. So sunset on the beach, armed with a Southern Living magazine, listening to the waves crash in, was the perfect ending to the day.

It was also fun today to see my former CDC colleagues- Fred Fridinger, Jay Bernhardt, and NIOSH friend Ginny Sublet.

Tomorrow afternoon is the big presentation. Seeing everyone else present today gave me confidence that I'll do okay. I think I'll be over-dressed though. What ever happened to professionalism?

Life is good.