While I Would Otherwise Have Been Sleeping . . .

If you know me, you know I am not a morning person. While I can feverishly—and happily—pursue my goals working on projects well into the night, the only reason I ever catch a glimpse of a sunrise is that I've stayed up all night. I don't do that very often.

Today, however, counts among the few days in which I've had (almost) a full night's sleep and managed to drag myself out of bed in the pre-dawn hours. In fact, I actually walked out my front door "around" four o'clock. And yes, that is in the morning.

The reason? I have this opportunity to attend a conference set up for a limited number of people interested in genetic genealogy, hosted by Family Tree DNA in Houston. The presentations are geared for FTDNA's project managers, of whom I'm just a fledgling. No matter how insignificant my contribution, though, I get to be included. And I'm totally jazzed.

There are a number of speakers featured in this weekend's proceedings. I'm looking forward to hearing each one of them. Two of them have presented at other genetic genealogy conferences I've attended—namely Michael F. Hammer of the Hammer Lab at the University of Arizona, and Miguel Vilar, the science manager at National Geographic's Genographic Project.

There are more speakers, of course. Prime among them is CNBC anchor Bill Griffeth, who authored the book I'll soon be discussing, The Stranger in My Genes. Familiar to those who read genealogy blogs is another speaker, Roberta Estes of DNA Explain, who also writes personalized DNA reports for FTDNA. Katherine Borges and Linda Magellan will be on hand from ISOGG and Barbara Rae-Venter from DNA Adoption.

Since I had to get up so early to catch my flight east to Houston, I toyed with the idea of just not bothering to sleep last night. But who am I kidding? I can't miss any sleep—I'm going in, eyes wide open for this two-day DNA marathon. I wouldn't want to miss even one moment of those proceedings.