It's April Fool's day

And it is also the first day of the BESS conference. Knowing some of the people in attendance as I do, the April Fool's day part of this worries me. Hopefully there will be nothing too wild, although I am on the panel to judge the battle of the bands competition tonight! Each of the four BESS consortia has submitted a music video, and from what I heard last night after some people had had a couple of glasses of wine, it should be pretty entertaining. Just need to get a moment to make score cards, though I can't imagine having to make anything beyond 4.

The NRG BESS gathering yesterday was great, so cool hearing about what other people are doing in their work. Also discussing different ideas, and the things that went wrong for other people, so I know what to try and avoid. I rather enjoyed presenting my work, it's such a nice comfortable environment to do it in, and you feel like people really want to know what you're doing!

Moving the NRG BESS group forward with a website, a conference, outreach activities and all the other plans we have is really exciting, and I definitely feel more inspired to take it all forward.

We had a great policy training workshop from the BESS directorate which really opened my eyes to the difficulties of trying to be a scientist in the policy and decision making world. Talks from Laura Harrison, and Kevin Hicks about their way into the policy/science world definitely gave me some food for thought. Would I ever be able to actually keep my opinions to myself and be unbiased?!?!

NRG BESS, and me on the left with rather unenthusiastic Jazz hands, it was the 4th attempt and I was hungry!