Hi! Hope everyone is having a great weekend!

I wanted to give a quick update: Sherif and I were traveling for a conference at James Madison University. This is also the reason I haven’t posted in the last couple of days – I’d been really swamped between preparing for the conference and the travels, and I’m a bit sleep-deprived (not very healthy!). The symposium was called Communication in the 21st Century: Obstacles and Opportunities, during which I presented about women in the blogging world! (I’ll post all the details really soon, along with a link to the paper I presented – so stay tuned… ).

Unfortunately, this meant that I have not been able to maintain my workout schedule, and since this is a short trip with a lot on the agenda, I probably will be able to start up again until Monday. :-/

Preparing for this presentation was stressful, but the good news is that it went well , and it’s also nice that the stress of preparing for it is over! My presentation was yesterday in the afternoon, and afterwards, I got to relax with family.

Today, we went out to a beautiful botanical garden and saw some of the first fruits of spring – the weather was a little bit cooler than we’d hoped, but the sun was shining and Sherif took pictures of some beautiful flowers and scenery. Here are a few I wanted to share :

Check out these gorgeous tulips:

And these were stunning too… Does anyone know what this flower is called?

Here’s one of us that my dad took…

After that, we came home and had some amazing home-cooked food! It’s good to be home with family, but it’s too bad it’s only a weekend visit…

Tomorrow we have another packed day, but I’ll try to squeeze in a quick post – especially if we get to take nice pictures!