She responded!

[And this is a blog I wrote a few days ago, but was apparently too tired to successfully send]

The girl from the desert conference responded to my heartfelt email. Here is the the email word for word that she wrote in response about three weeks after I wrote her my original email

[my name],
Thanks for your kind email. I do have a boyfriend, and he is not big and scary but he is a really great guy. I appreciate your compliments and I will revisit them any time I need a reminder or a day-brightener.
Best of luck in [The City]

[her name]

The city name and our names have been edited out to maintain anonymity.

We have a group of high school kids this week, so we're stepping up our material to make it withstand high schoolers. But they're from an alternative learning school, so they really aren't very smart.

We dissected grasshoppers today and I was trying to talk with one of the teachers and explain why I thought mammal dissection was a valid lab for high schoolers (fetal pigs probably) and that potentially, if you are dissecting an arthropod with an open circulatory system and cerebral ganglion in place of a brain, that really isn't going to be furthering any students' interests about medicine and human physiology. But they are an alternative school, so they can do whatever they want to. They exhaust me.