procyonraccoon | Recent Entries

On the Saturday after New Year's I went hiking in the Magdalena Mountains with my father, taking advantage of the freakishly warm winter that New Mexico has been having this year. While snowless mountains on New Year's is not completely unprecedented, this year even the highest peaks have been totally bare and temperatures for Saturday were forecast in the 50's (F) even at altitude. My dad had proposed a short loop hike on the east side of the mountains out of Magdalena, but had greatly underestimated the distance and it ended up being about 10 miles in total. Still, we finished by 4pm, and made it back into town to watch the Avatar sequel that my mom insisted we go see (which was not as bad as I expected, but at 3 hours was clearly too long).

The next day it was finally time for my visit to Socorro to end - after several years parked in the second week of January, this year the American Astronomical Society meeting had migrated back to the first week right after New Year's, and for the 24th year in a row (skipping over the covid years) I would of course be attending. I had lunch with one of my grad school friends in Albuqerque, then was dropped off at the airport for a short flight to this year's conference venue in Phoenix.

I admittedly go to the AAS mainly for social reasons, and this year I didn't even have particularly high hopes for that - it was expected to be a smaller conference than usual (due to grant tightening and so on...) and I didn't see many people I knew on the agenda. However, within an hour of checking into the hotel I had already found a group of old grad school friends and associated scientists in my area to hang out with.

Midway through that conversation, suddenly the topic took an unexpected turn: someone made a remark about "the furry convention in the other hotel". I initially could hardly believe it, but every other member of the group confirmed and suddenly everyone at the table was talking about all the furries with their tails and costumes...! It was a friendly group and I very nearly told the others that I totally would have attended that convention if I had any idea it was happening... but the conversation moved onto the next topic after a minute - and, alas, the con (Painted Desert Fur Con) was already ending at that point, and I personally never even saw another furry. Alas! Still, it is wild to think that probably a quarter of my astronomy colleagues at the meeting (those in the main hotel and who had arrived by midday) were sharing the conspace with a furry con. Crazy. And given that this is already the fourth time that something like this has happened with the AAS (MagFest twice, Anthro Pacific Northwest) I clearly am going to need to pay more attention to the early-January con rosters in the future.

Monday was the first day of the meeting - but it was also the first day "back at work" for those who had taken holidays between Christmas and New Years, which means I awoke to a deluge of deferred e-mail replies from the holiday period. Among them were a couple of key items: (1) I *finally* had approval from my collaboration to submit the paper that I was presenting (and giving a press conference presentation for!) at the meeting, and (2) the press contacts at my university and elsewhere had *finally* replied and started working on associated press releases. (These were both things I had hoped to do over the holidays but I had to wait for the relevant people to get back online.) Also, students were sending me e-mails about the upcoming exam, which would be taking place on Wednesday in my absence, and I was getting replies to other, long-forgotten items. And of course I had a conference to go to with sessions from 8am to 7pm every day. Arrgh!

But I managed it somehow - quickly dashing out revisions to the press release, writing my talks, and doing the final edits and checks on the paper now that it had obtained final co-author approval. I missed a few talks (and some sleep) but everything got done when it needed. As usual my university press officer screwed up the release somewhat (putting it out two days early and over-sensationalizing things), but the press talk went well.

Somewhat unexpectedly, it was also a very useful meeting scientifically. I was somewhat worried that with the idiocy coming out of the federal government over the past year that this meeting would be a bleak event to rue our misfortunes: cancelled projects, imminent closures, furloughed employees, closed labs, and so on. Thankfully, that was not the vibe because (so far) the worst has not come to pass. The draconian cuts proposed last spring in the President's bill were not written into the congressional budget, and while US science funding didn't increase it also didn't fall by much, and all the missions in development are still going forward. Probably that's not going to change, even if it looks like the money to build some of the ambitious future facilities is not there, yet.

There was even some good news. The NASA head of science gave an exceptionally upbeat and politically astute talk on the state of the agency's science/mission portfolio, and included a segment on the reboost of Swift, a satellite critical to my research that has been projected to fall to Earth in 2026. They are launching a mission go latch onto it and boost its orbit to extend its lifetime, and so far that seems to be on schedule while the satellite itself is likely to remain in orbit long enough for the attempt to be made. That would certainly be a relief.

The bigger surprise (to me) was the announcement later in the meeting that a billionaire (one of the Google co-founders) was spending a huge chunk of his fortune to build four new observatories, all of which were expected to come online by the end of the decade. Additionally, proposals and data will be open to anyone worldwide. Two of these projects are directly in my area of research and offer a far more natural future research pathway for me to make use of than any of the other major astronomical facilities that will be finished soon. Lately I've been feeling somewhat concerned about my future... and how I would sell my research plan in future grant applications (and maybe job applications) but now there is a clear pathway.

Between that, good times with astronomy friends, the successful completion of a project that has been dogging me for months, and giving a well-received press talk (and scientific) talk, it's fair to say I left the meeting in pretty high spirits. A lot has not gone well in the world, and in my life specifically, over the past year but it's good to be reminded that there are some aspects of my life which are going well and some things I can still look forward to.

I started the year off by doing something I've been considering for a long time - finally exporting my entire, 22-year-old LiveJournal history onto another site, specifically this one. I have been pondering this on and off for a few years now: the number of friends who are active on LJ has continually dwindled over the years (the number currently stands at two), and my engagement with the place has felt more and more questionable over the years. The site was sold to a Russian company well over a decade ago, which initially wasn't a problem, but as the Russian government has become more and more oppressive over the years I have felt increasingly uncomfortable that the definitive written account of my entire adult life is hosted exclusively in a hostile foreign country. On top of that, most of my readers these days are probably not on LJ - and while the LJ experience is largely fine for those with registered accounts, anyone without one is subject to irritating advertisements (mostly unintelligible Russian ones) and that's not really the experience I would like to subject my friends to when they come to check in on my life.

This has all been the case for a while, but what eventually tipped things over the edge was an announcement that LJ is going to require its users to register with a Russian government digital ID to continue to use the site. As I understand the situation (from a Bluesky thread that made the rounds yesterday), foreign-language posters will be exempted... but as a consequence the site is going to have to wall off Russian from non-Russian users almost entirely, and it's unclear what incentive the developers have to maintain the non-Russian part given that Western sanctions prohibit most forms of advertising payment from the outside. I have a couple of low-quality backups on my laptop, but they're lacking formatting, material behind cuts, and various other things, and restoring them to something readable would be incredibly unwieldy were LJ to just... disappear with no warning; nor would there be any way of announcing where I'd be moving.

This probably won't happen. Still, I had some time to kill this week and New Year Day's seemed an appropriate time to get started on a new site. So here I am.

The import was pretty painless - or at least it should have been. I had to plead with the developers to ask them remove "raccoon" from the list of banned account words (lol), but thankfully they did so almost immediately. (The account names "procyon" and "procyonid" were, alas, taken). I then had the brilliant idea that I would repost my old entries manually instead of trusting the automatic import system... but gave up after the first 200 entries or so when I realized that that would literally require days of tedious effort and was prone to mistakes with setting the dates correctly. (Additionally, skimming through so many old entries was starting to get genuinely chronologically disorienting.) Fortunately, the automatic import feature ran flawlessly (although I then had to go back and delete all the duplicates from the old entries I did manually crosspost), and the last two decades of my life are now safely duplicated here.

For now my presence here is primarily as a backup, and to provide an alternative for readers who would like to learn what I'm up to without being clogged by advertisements: I'll be cross-posting to both places... at least for now, and probably for as long as I still have friends over on the other place.

Another year has gone by and another new one is about to start. This year I have plenty of time to write a retrospective: I'd been expecting that the time around New Year's was going to be yet another busy period of intensely trying to finish a grant application, but I discovered yesterday that in fact I wasn't eligible for that grant round anyway. So the week or so that I'd attempted to keep my schedule clear for was suddenly available for other things, including this entry.

That's just as well, because this was a very eventful year for me that's provided a lot to think about. For once, the big developments in my life were not professional but personal. I began the year in a friendship with someone I'd only known for a few months by then but was already the closest relationship I'd ever had, and it felt like it was on the verge of transitioning into something more when I was ready to acknowledge it. But I didn't feel ready then, and by the time I was close to coming around to the idea, the whole situation collapsed: he met someone else, and overnight the aspects that made the relationship so meaningful vanished. This might have been manageable, except that we had just finished arranging almost two months of continuous travel together on the basis of the relationship as it stood before this new development. The result was a great deal of emotional distress and heartbreak that lasted long after the trip was over; its echoes still darken my thoughts now.

Compared to that, the rest of 2025 seemed almost inconsequential, even if quite a bit happened. The most important professional development is that I graduated another PhD student, my second to date: he defended his thesis on time in July, he invited me to his (very fun) wedding in August, and he moved abroad in September to start a postdoc at a top US university, not-coicindentally the same one that I worked at following my PhD and which springboarded most of my post-2014 research. I was very happy and proud of him, and (particularly since this was going on in parallel with the most difficult parts of my own personal life this year) is one of the things that made the emotionally difficult summer bearable.

This year featured the usual loads of travel. January's travels to Santa Fe and Colorado are now bittersweet given the company involved, but were still among the best experiences I've had. I made a quick business trip to Baltimore in February to select the proposals to be scheduled on JWST; in March I returned to Baltimore and then went to Italy barely a week later for back-to-back conferences. Following the drama-filled trips of April and May, I had another long US visit this summer, two different weekend hops to Berlin, a hiking trip to Scotland, and a quick trip to a different wedding that helped me reconnect with a number of old friends.

I had some hopes that this would be a less busy year at work, since I accepted a change in role that removed some of my high-time-committment responsibilities in exchange for a less-busy but more management-style role. However, most of that time in practice was eaten up by the fact that I ended up writing yet another very long and ambitious paper, and between that and teaching and travel I hardly had any time to myself after the summer. (I finished the paper last week, though, and will be submitting it in a few days.)

It's an open question how 2026 will go. I've felt on unsure footing this whole year already, and there are some big unknowns that make next year even more uncertain.

First, some risks at work are emerging: I've been successful in my job as a researcher largely on the basis of our university's small telescope, which gives me a way to contribute in a unique way to a variety of global research collaborations. However, said telescope is having some major problems lately (since September it has been operating only about half the time); meanwhile the "bigger and better" version in development that was intended to be its successor looks increasingly unlikely to ever be built. I (probably!) won't be out of a job of these projects fail, but my rationale for staying where I am becomes particularly thin... and I'm not sure how happy I'd be at work if I no longer have the tools to remain at what I feel is the cutting edge.

For a long time the animating, long-term goal at work was to stay at the top of my game so that I could, eventually, move back to the US on my terms (to a top university in a nice place to live). This goal is becoming less clear: certainly in the short term, the situation for US science funding is still dismal and few research-intensive universities are in a hiring mood: I only identified one job of interest this year, back in New Mexico, and didn't apply for it in the end (almost certainly a mistake). But things in the UK are not really much better - the long term threats to the telescope are the reflection of a different problems in Britain's funding landscape. These also have no obvious solution, and when one looks at the national political climate things could get worse as easily as they could get better. Meanwhile I stay in a sort of stasis - I've been in Liverpool for 9 years now, the longest continuous span of time I've lived anywhere. And while earlier this year I was starting to feel like maybe I should just accept that this really is a "permanent" thing, I still really don't know.

Socially, things are also confusing. One thing that gets me down a little is that I no longer have any friend I am in daily contact with or to travel with. I was hoping to find a way to remain friends with the person who swept into that role so enthusiastically last spring, but it seems not to be; we remained in frequent online contact for a while but the situation always hurt, and I now haven't heard from him in well over a month. But it also quietly hurts that an older friend, who played that role for most of the past decade, seems to have largely lost interest in such things anymore. Going back further, my "IRL" friends from a decade ago are all married and most have children; I can (and do) visit them but we are unlikely to plan trips to go see the world or do things together.

I will have to find a way to rebuild these kinds of experiences in 2026, but it is so hard. Most people my age have others they will always care about more than me, or require something I can't easily give them to go beyond a "standard" friendship, or (perhaps most frustrating at all) we seem like we should be very close on paper but... it just doesn't seem to work, and often the problem is at my end. I don't know.

My one hope is that 2026 will genuinely be a less busy year than 2025 (fewer work trips, fewer review panels, and less teaching) so there will, if all goes well, be some time to try. Some vague ideas for trips are lined up, I've reconnected with some old friends, I have some newer contacts... and so on. We'll see how it goes. In the meantime, I'll do my best to celebrate the new year in good spirits (even if there are no parties or celebrations lined up) and take things as they come.

It's the holidays again, which means finally I have a break. I finished the paper draft that had been dogging me on the 23rd, clearing up the next few days to spend with family and friends enjoying the season as best I can.

As has been the case for a few years in a row now, the weather has not been feeling particularly seasonable - almost every day since I returned to New Mexico has seen record-setting or near-record-setting warmth, with conditions that are more like April (or October) than December. I can't complain too much about this; the sunshine is a nice contrast to the weather in the UK this time of year and the warmth (and lack of wind) made the luminaria set-up on Christmas Eve comfortable and easy. My brother came down from Albuquerque for much longer than usual (after breaking up with his long-term girlfriend this spring, he had no particular reason to rush back up) - meaning the whole family was here for a few days, although the four days were probably enough as my brother has a tendency to get rude and moody at times.

Even though my hometown is tiny, there have been lots of good social things to do as well. The neighbors had their usual Christmas Eve party, which was fun (even if it's mostly my parents' friends, of course). We had company over for Christmas dinner as well (same disclaimer applies, but it was still good company). One of my close high school friends was back in town again this year; he (and his brother, who still lives in town) came over a couple times to hang out and the three of us also went over to a local bar yesterday afternoon for a couple hours to reminisce on old times.

At the same time, some of the same ennui of Christmases past has returned a little bit this year. Things are fine... but are they getting better? Do I have a means to make them better? Ah, well. I'll leave the deeper thoughts for my next entry in a day or two, and will try to enjoy the things that remain good in my life while I have the chance.

Once I returned to Liverpool after my last trip to the US, it was right back into the thick of things - with less than two weeks between my return and the next (much longer) trip, there was a lot to do and not much time to do it.

Some of these things were pleasant diversions - December is always a pleasant time of year with lots of excuses to come together and be social. The work Christmas dinner was last Wednesday, and (as was the case the past couple years) it was combined with the casual end-of-semester "seminar" in which everyone in the department presents a silly slide about themselves. My former student who graduated in 2020 was there as were all of my current students, and despite the turkey dinner I'd pre-ordered arriving very late we had a great time there and at the "pre-game" and "post-game" pub stops on either side of the main event. One of my students also decided to introduce an Irish tradition(?) known as "12 pubs of Christmas" involving a huge pub crawl across the city starting mid-afternoon and lasting until after midnight (I did not last that long - joined midway through and "only" visited about 5 of the pubs).

But mostly I've been working. Some of that was teaching - running the end-of-year review session, proofreading and printing out the exams, reading final reports, and so on. Most of it has been working to try and complete a task has been something that's been sitting on my agenda for months: finally completing the paper on the astronomical event my collaboration discovered a year ago in September. This is something I'd hoped to finish long ago and it has become something of an albatross, the urgency only keeps increasing. A different group posted a competing paper effctively scooping us in the literature many months ago; I've been scheduled to give a press conference at the AAS meeting in January (which requires a complete analysis); and I really really simply need to move onto other things as this has been distracting me from other, longer-term priorities for too long.

The hope was to complete this before I flew out to New Mexico on the 21st for my usual Christmas family visit, a self-imposed deadline I didn't quite manage. This meant that the first two days of my "vacation" continued to involve hammering away at the final changes to the draft. But that's done now, so I get at least a few days to relax - before the next big task coming up just after Christmas...

My flight into Chicago touched down shortly before midnight on Thursday, and after a few minutes of searching I was able to track down the hotel shuttle and make my way over to my quarters for the night. I was on a different shuttle from usual because I was staying at a different hotel from usual: for the first time ever, this year I did not find a way into the main hotel and so would be staying at one of the overflows (the Aloft, about a 10 minute walk away from the convention center).

A lot of things about this year were different, in fact, although some of these differences were really reversions to past form. A lot of old friends weren't there: MFF increasingly seems to be off the radar for the west coast furry contingent, and there were few familiar faces from at least that phase of my life. On the other hand, some older friends re-emerged to attend this year for the first time in a while: Fylwind (who I roomed with in 2022 but didn't come last year), Izixs (who hasn't been to MFF since probably 2019), Astro (who probably hasn't been since 2015!), and Aeron (same as Astro). I also was without my fursuit, and went into the con in a fairly anxious state that never fully subsided... but I'll get to that later.

I was rooming with Fylwind and Izixs this year, although Fylwind was not arriving until Friday and Izixs was already asleep in bed by the time I reached the room. Because unfortunately we only were able to get a king bed in the room draw, Izixs had brought an air mattress and set it up on the floor - I'd agreed to sleep there for the duration of the con since I'd failed to obtain anything better off-block. I quietly changed upon entry and settled into the sheets that had been left there. However, a wicked draft was coming in off the window and A/C unit (it was a very cold night outside) and pretty soon I found myself curled up against the cold. Draping a jacket and trying to plug the draft with pillows didn't work, so around 3:30am I hunted down the thermostat to find that the heating was off entirely! Izixs, being an arctic dragon, had apparently not noticed. I turned on the heat and was able to sleep soundly soon after that.

The following morning Izixs and I made our way over to the next-door mall to hunt for breakfast, but only found a Cinnabon and had to make do with that (which wasn't a terrible decision, to be honest). We then went over to the convention center, and Izixs peeled off to go to a panel while I met up Aeron who had made it over to the con from the shuttle hotel (Astro was delayed due to a work call he had to stay for). Aeron and I wandered around the conspace for a while and dropped by a panel on invasive species, but Astro arrived in the middle of that and I quickly scampered off to meet him and make our way to our "old" MFF hangout (Red Bar) for a quick drink before dinner.

Friday dinner was my annual MFF physics meet up, and I was pleased that we had a really good crowd this year: there were of course me, Izixs, Fylwind, and Astro, plus Tundra (new to the event), Vanen, and a couple +1's. We had a good conversation (and a couple good beers) before moving on for the evening. Astro, Aeron and I went over to the pinball machines and played there for a while (I was as bad as always) before eventually calling it a night a little on the early side as I was unexpectedly tired.

I woke up around 10am the next day and went to get breakfast downstairs. By 11am my roommates were still asleep and Astro and Aeron were already at the con, so I walked over to greet them, We spent a couple hours in the enormous Dealer's Den (and also had lunch there), and I picked up about $100 worth of framed prints from Animal Shapes (a furry artist who draws a lot of hiking/outdoors/nature scenes), a raccoon tote bag from Weasel Gear to carry the above, and some stickers here and there. After that we went to the Art Show, Artist Alley, and other standard con stuff before making our way over to a local cinema for a screening of none other than Zootopia 2, which I hadn't seen yet (and neither had most of the others).

I absolutely adored the first Zootopia, going to see it in theaters five or six times - because of the furry angle, of course, but I loved the super-creative animal world that kept all the funny species quirks and size differences, and the wonderful characters (the optimistic main character who was always so buouyant and determined despite any setback, the cynical street fox who learns some things are bigger tham himself). Zootopia 2 offered more of all of that, and the first half was particularly fun, setting up all kind of silly scenes and character interactions that riffed on its richly detailed and playful animal world. The second half I found a little more... questionable. Zootopia (or at least part of it) is revealed to be some sort of ethnically-cleansed apartheid state formed by driving out all the reptiles 100 years ago, which struck me as a little bit heavy even for a soft-edged funny-animal world. (Of course, they make it all better in the end, but I found it an odd choice to add to the canon.) Also, I found some of the second-act parts a little bit too melodramatic. Still, they landed the ending and (perhaps best of all) very strongly implied that there would be a Zootopia 3 in the end-credit scene, and considering that was made before the film reeled half a billion in ticket sales in we can probably treat another sequel as a given. Bring it on! In the meantime, I probably won't see the current film another five times... but I still enjoyed it a lot, and hope to check it out at least once more while it's still in theaters.

Anyway, back to the con - as soon as the movie ended I walked over to the Hyatt to catch up with my longtime friends Ye and Toki (and a couple of their friends) for the annual outing to Club Lucky, an extremely good Italian place in the city. We had a reservation at 8pm but arrived closer to 7:30; fortunately they were able to seat us early and we had a good time in the crowded, Christmas-decorated setting, having cocktails and amazing food and generally good times.

Arriving back at the con, we went up to Toki's room for a couple beers; I invited Astro and Aeron to come up and we had a nice time chatting before we all moved across the hall to what was supposed to be a "gear party" of some sort but was generally quite subdued, and the only mandatory accessories was a set of fake stick-on moustaches. We chilled there for an hour or so before calling it a night a little after midnight.

On Sunday I slept in a bit, then went over the con to catch Astro and Aeron once again for the final proper day of the con. We went to a game show panel, and then went to see the dance competition before once again winding over to Red Bar at their opening hour. This time we were in no rush, and we spent a few hours there before Astro and Aeron had to depart to drive back.

I stayed behind, as I'd invited someone I knew and really wanted to meet during the con to join and he'd told me he would be there shortly. Another two hours later he still hadn't shown, but updated me to say he was going to dinner and asked if I would still be around when he got back. I said I probably would be, but he never updated me after that, and I started to fall into a bit of a sad funk - I was just sitting in the bar on my own drinking $12 beers. But I got through it, and eventually a different friend (Sandy) and her partner showed up after being stuck for hours closing out the art show, and we had a nice chat before the bar closed and we had to leave. I dropped by the dance (which was rocking but extremely loud) and then went back to the hotel to crash out for the final time.

Finally on Monday, I woke up much earlier than I would have liked, waited for Izixs to do the same (Fylwind was not there, as he had decided to book a hotel room on his own in the Hyatt when a room appeared there halfway through the con and left our Aloft roomshare on Saturday evening). Izixs dropped me off at the airport before making the drive home, and I had a brief "airport con" encounter with Sandy in the United lounge before she flew out and I did the same shortly after.

That was the weekend. It was an unsual con in that I spent almost the whole time with a small group of two or three friends (and without a fursuit), which is the way I did cons in the... 2000s but rarely if ever since. That (plus the lack of huge parties, late night escapades, or similar schenanigans) meant it was a very quiet and chill event overall, despite the packed and chaotic 17,000-attendee environment all around. I suppose that's OK.

Indeed, probably the most notable thing is what did not happen. The person who was as of a year ago the closest friend I ever had, and probably more than that, was at the con... but never reached out to me, nor did I reach out to him. So maybe this is truly the sad end of that saga. Time will tell. In the meantime, I have another solemn flight across the pond, and then it's back to a work frenzy for another couple weeks before the holidays return.

Sunday was my last day in New Mexico, and my parents brought me up to Albuquerque in the afternoon to drop me off at the house of my friend and grad school roommate V., who is now a professor in the physics department of the University of New Mexico and lives in the heights above town. The weather was pretty good and we went for a short walk, followed by the obligatory New Mexican dinner before I was dropped off at my brother's place for the night.

We talked about lots of things, but the most signifcant was something I'd been pondering over for most of the last few months: for the first time in at least five years the University of New Mexico was hiring in astronomy, and for the first time in probably ten years or more this hire was open to a senior level position. My friend had in fact tipped me off earlier in the summer that this would probably happen and again when the position was posted, and I was thinking about it seriously. Returning to New Mexico 26 years after leaving would be strange; I had left to pursue bigger dreams and to return would feel almost like giving up on those dreams, even as the long absence made me appreciate what I left behind much more. Family would be nearby (something I've never had as an adult), and so would some friends, there are plenty of activities that appeal to me (hiking/skiing), and it's a low cost of living area. But there was no obvious career reason to move to a public university in New Mexico, and there would be no going back - it would be hard to ever leave the US again, and with the US's scientific future murky that felt risky.

But as usual when it comes to these things, I procrastinated myself into inaction (I had an urgent paper to finish and felt unable to step back and think about the long term while in the thick of that) - and the deadline, which was Monday, came and went. My friend was a little disappointed, and in the conversations with him I increasingly started to feel that allowing this opportunity to pass was a mistake - we are approaching something of a make or break moment at my workplace and for UK science more generally... and even though things are murky now, an offer that were to come along in March would be much better timed. (A year from now things will be clearer still... but an opportunity quite like this may not come again.) Ah, well. Too late now... or is it? My UCSD interview two years ago was off the back of an application I submitted an entire month late, so the topic will be bouncing about my head for a little while yet, probably.

In any case, on Monday I was off to the next stop in this trip, a visit back to Cornell in upstate New York. A collaborator of mine (indeed, my most important collaborator by far) moved there four years ago to take up a job on their astronomy faculty, and she's invited me over on a number of occasions to work on some joint projects we have going and meet her students and postdocs. Given Ithaca's somewhat isolated location these visits can be a little hard to swing, but in 2022 and 2023 I was able to combo a visit with MFF, and this year I was able to further combine things with my Thanksgiving travels to do all three back to back.

The downside is that - as I knew very well from my time 21 years ago when I was an undergraduate at Cornell going back and forth from there to New Mexico over holidays and spring break - getting between Albuqerque and Ithaca is a fairly time-consuming endeavor. My brother dropped me off at the airport a little before 9am, my flight out was at 11am, and after stops in Denver and Dulles I arrived into Ithaca a little after midnight.

My collaborator had offered to let me stay with her and her partner to save money on a hotel, which I decided to accept - while I would lose some independence in the evenings, it provided an opportunity to talk more and strengthen our connection (and my parents have their collaborators and science friends over all the time, so it didn't feel weird). They were nice enough to pick me up at the airport as well, and after a quick orientation to the place (and their two very cute resident cats) I went down to their basement bedroom and fell asleep for the night.

The next day I woke up to exactly the thing I was hoping for on this visit - falling snow and a beautiful white blanket all over the trees and paths. (I like snow and was a little bit nostalgic for the many "snow days" on campus I had when I was there, it was a big part in choosing to study there 26 years ago!) The walk from their place to campus was largely through forest paths above the big campus lake, so could hardly be better as winter landscapes go.

The rest of the visit also went fine - I met some old faces in the department (although not many remain from my times there), talked with my collaborator and her group members (who all seem to be quite fun, and one of them in particular endeared himself to me by wearing a sweatshirt with a photo of a raccoon on it on day), gave a "short" presentation, and in general had a useful and productive time. I didn't do too much nostalgia stuff, but I did have a quick walk around campus to see many of the sights from this brief period of my past, now covered in fresh snow.

Today was the end of that visit, though, and after a quick dinner I was off to the airport for a very late flight to my next stop: Chicago, because it's fur con time again!

The wave of intense business at work has finally crested now, after finishing a trio of major tasks. The largest by far is a (now long overdue) draft of the paper on a particular strange transient that we found a year ago; second largest is the conclusion of lectures for the course I teach; third largest is finishing my comments and feedback on (almost) all of the grant proposals I regrettably agreed to review.

Up until a few days ago my only real break was Friday evening, although it was a particularly pleasant one as Lupestripe came over to pay me a visit. I made an early departure from the usual Friday after-work pub to meet Lupe at the train station, and we made our way over to Bold Street for a burger dinner (or at least it was supposed to be, before my patty escaped from the bun and I ended up just eating bread, condiments, amd fries instead...) followed by an abbreviated bar crawl (if two bars counts as a crawl) that ended at the quirky basement bar near where I live. Lupe was extremely good company as always and even if we couldn't get too crazy (I would be working all weekend and Lupe would be catching an early train out of town to go visit their uncle) it was still a good time, particular as I don't have visitors in town that often anymore.

Another weekend of solid work followed, a hectic Monday and Tuesday - and then it was off on my next trip. I decided earlier in the year that I would come to visit my family again for Thanksgiving: last year was extremely pleasant, and I was feeling a little guilty for my abbreviated summer visit in which I was only in Socorro for about three days. So off I was again on Wednesday morning, taking the long flight to Denver and then the short one to Albuqerque. After being picked up we went almost immediately to a fancy restaurant to celebrate my father's 79th birthday, which was very pleasant (and indulgent), before driving down to Socorro.

With the pressure briefly off, since then it's been a relatively chill weekend. Like last year, my parents invited over a bunch of coworkers for Thanksgiving dinner, which was nice - they were good company, even if I had to wind down my participation in the evening a bit early on account for still being fairly jet lagged. On Friday my dad and I went for a hike in the Magdelena Mountains not far out of town (on a trail I haven't been on in at least 20 years), and I went to see the second Wicked movie with my mom. In the meantime I've been writing Christmas cards - sending out cards last year (with custom artwork) was such a positive experience I've resolved to do this every year from now on, and since my cards arrived just in time for this trip I've been using the brief downtime and a base in the US to write and package up the first batch of 35 to send to various US addresses.

I had told myself I would mostly work on Saturday, but I ended up getting very little done after having shifted out of work mode. I suppose that's OK - after the last couple months I could use a more significant break.

Work has remained just as hectic as it was leading up to my last post. We're still in the thick of the academic year, I'm still trying very hard to finish up an urgent paper - and on top of that, I've been racing to try to meet my obligations for another reponsibility that I (probably foolishly) agreed to to do. In this case I volunteered to be on the panel to shortlist candidates for the Royal Society university research fellowship, a £2 million award given to non-permanent researchers (generally senior postdocs) to kick-start their university careers, so I'm reading through pages and pages of applicant's research statments and other supporting materials to provide rankings and feedback for a Wednesday deadline.

All this has not afforded time for much else besides work. Halloween was largely a bust this year, although Baloki did come by for a few hours on the following Sunday to walk around Liverpool with me (we did the Royal Liver Building tour in the day, and walked around seeing the River of Light exhibits in the evening). Last weekend was the Manchester furmeet, but I decided to stay home as well to work both Saturday and Sunday all day. I can't complain too much about this: I am feeling extremely motivated and fired up about what I'm doing and generally enjoying the work (although these reviews are a bit of a slog...) Still, as this period drags on I do start to rue the lost opportunities of what I could be doing instead. For example, I felt a little bad last weekend after finding out that it was Doveux's birthday: at the end of August he spontaneously came to Liverpool when he found out it was my birthday, and I felt bad that I was not able to make it over his way at all a couple months later to return the favor.

Still, at least this weekend I was able to do something else, as Doveux and a few others had floated the silly idea of arranging a trip up to Newcastle to visit the Gregg's pub to get fancied-up pastry bakes and beer. Lots of people in the group expressed interest and a plan was made, and even when it turned out that said pub had no reservation slots available the day we had agreed to go we decided to go through with it anyway.

Saturday was the Leeds furmeet, and I made my way there early-afternoon to meet up with rest of the Newcastle group (in the end: Doveux, Sy, Patter, Lupestripe, and Skavi), all of whom were already there. On account of the wet weather the meet was a pretty basic one (I did not bring my fursuit), but we stayed almost until the end and then divided ourselves into two different cars to journey up to Newcastle. (The train journey would have been £80, and with two drivers and two cars going by road was an easy call.) We arrived in town early-evening, dropped things off in our rental apartment, then took a taxi to a nice pub overlooking the riverside that was one of Doveux's university-days haunts and stayed there for an hour or so. We then walked along the river to a nice curry restaurant, and followed that up with a short bar crawl until around 1am, then returned to our apartment.

The next day was the "main event": we were able to get a reservation at the Greggs pub at 11:15am, which was fantastic news except that we only did this at about 10:30am, so it was a bit of a scramble to get there on time. But we made it eventually (after wandering through the huge department store the pub was at the back of) and had our ridiculous (but actually fairly tasty) pastries with Christmas-dinner fixings and Greggs-themed beers from a local brewery. I then went with Patter and Doveux on a little metro jaunt around town (while Skavi went to meet up with a local friend and Lupe and Sy to drop off some purchases in the car) before meeting up at the venue for the Newcastle furmeet, which apparently takes place on Sunday. Admittedly, by that time I was getting a little bit tired, and also feeling guilty that I still had a lot of work to do - so I was not as sociable as I would have liked to be, but I still had a good time.

That was the last thing on the agenda though, and so at the conclusion of the meet we made our way back to the cars (perhaps taking the hint from the name of a moving company whose door we passed on the way: they called themselves "Raccoon Removals") and drove back south. Doveux dropped off me and Skavi at the tram and from there I found my way back home, arriving around 10pm.

It was a nice break, but now it's back to the previous pattern, at least for a few days!

It's been a while since I've written here, and the reason is the usual one - this time of year is busy at work, and without travel to provide an occasion to post I've mostly been content to just churn through work (and whatever social opportunities on weekends that I can scrounge). But there is at least plenty to report on that front, so here's a brief summary of where things are at in that regime.

The proximiate cause of the busy period is, of course, teaching: classes started in late September and so each week has featured the usual grind of spending 9am-5pm in the classroom each Tuesday, and a half a day on either side preparing. Admittedly, things are a little more relaxed on that count this year compared to the previous few - after having to overhaul several aspects of my statistics course because students can now get AI to do their homework for them, the course delivery has mostly settled back to a steady state in which huge changes from last year aren't necessary. Additionally, I handed over my other fall course (on observational astrophysics) to another instructor this summer and no longer have to worry about that all, and as further relief I've also shed responsibility for organizing our weekly research seminar. Partially compensating is that I've now taken over a management role for overseeing the whole data science master's programme... but so far that's been pretty straightforward.

In the meantime I've been trying - on and off - to finish the big paper resulting from the very exciting astronomical object we found around this time last year. The pressure has been on with this work for a while, although we gathered so much data that getting it organized and making sense of it all has been slow going, and it's been hard to find time to just buckle down and get it done... although progress is happening gradually, and maybe within a couple weeks I'll finally be there.

The latest distraction from that effort - admittedly, a very fun one - was the discovery of a different new and shiny astronomical transient a few weeks ago. One of our collaborators tipped us off that an otherwise unremarkable-looking faint supernova in our ongoing survey was at the location of a possible gravitational lens system, and later in the month we used our university telescope to show that the object had been split into multiple images as predicted, an exciting discovery on its own that we announced to the broader community. However, the nature of the supernova didn't seem consistent with anything we'd seen before and we remained unsure what to do with it until Friday, when a different collaborator sent us some data that indicated the object was far more distant than we thought. When we found out that a competing group had picked up on our early discovery and was writing a paper in secret, I was able to convince the others to go for an all-hands-on-deck sprint to finish our own paper on the discovery on the same timescale, and this weekend I was working basically nonstop (except sleep) to get that done. We somehow managed to get the paper in just two days and submitted just a few hours ago, just slightly behind the other group. Even though it was basically a weekend working it was honestly some of the most fun I've had in a while in a professional context, and it was good to know that I can still get really inspired about astrophysics research after the past year whipsawed my priorities.

Other than that: there have been proposal deadlines, I took on board yet another PhD student (... kind of), and the office has been more "lively" in general now that the academic year is fully underway. Meanwhile, another sort of dilemma that always hits this time of year has risen to the fore - but that will have to be a subject for another time.

Although the semester is getting started and my schedule is becoming very busy for a wide variety of reasons, this weekend I squeezed in another short trip back to the US (just four days). I had a good excuse: one of my good friends was getting married, and I'd been invited to attend their wedding at Yerkes Observatory in southern Wisconsin.

The friend in question was one of my graduate school classmates. From the beginning he was the consummate intellectual of our group, known for doing things like reading books on his walk to work (flipping the pages as he crossed the street) or wanting to engage in deep discussions about philosophy or politics at parties. He TA'd on a course in economics "for fun". My own interests were not quite that broad, but nevertheless he and I got along well as the "true believers" our cohort, in the sense that even as our other classmates became somewhat disillusioned with grad school and astronomy in general, the two of us remained as enthusiastic as when we started. However, he did have his challenges: he'd chosen an extremely difficult PhD thesis project, and as a result of that became fairly stressed/overworked in his last couple years and graduated a year "late", at least relative to the rest of our cohort. When he finally did graduate in 2012 he was only moderately successful on the postdoc job market, and ended up in Ohio for many years - meaning that I fell somewhat out of touch with him, at least compared to other students who remained closer to California. However, not long after I left California for Denmark he moved to Pasadena to take up a staff job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and in the intervening years we've slowly reconnected since I've been seeing him during my annual visits to Caltech. Indeed, on all of my visits since the covid pandemic I've stayed with him at his apartment. Tthis year he (at age 43) became engaged, and I was invited to the wedding, and I happily agreed to attend.

The location was an interesting one: Yerkes Observatory, a historic astronomical observatory built at the end of the 19th century in Wisconsin (one of the last major observatories not on a dry mountaintop). It's only an hour or so by car from O'Hare, and initially I figured I'd be flying in there, but after some time I realized that the location was also quite near another old grad school friend - in this case Astro, the younger furry in my graduate program when I was there. He'd married back in 2010 or so, and later had children and (in 2020) moved to the Madison area. Since his move I'd seen him again only once, and it was a relatively brief meeting (at yet another wedding). But his house is only an hour and change by car from Yerkes, and so I arranged to fly to Madison instead and crash with him. Originally I was only going to do so for one night, but hotels around the wedding were very expensive and I decided in the end to just crash with him all three nights I was in town and just make the day-trip drive to the venue on both Friday (for the pre-wedding dinner) and Saturday (for the wedding itself).

I flew in on Thursday, arriving in the evening and having time to briefly catch up and meet the other members of the family before falling asleep. On Friday we went out for breakfast and for lunch, and then mid-afternoon I made the drive out to the restaurant near the wedding where the pre-wedding dinner was held. I'd been a little bit apprehensious that I might not know anyone but one other grad school era friend was there, and people were also pretty social in general (lots of them were astronomers, which helped), so I was able to stay nearly to the end of the event that day before driving back.

For Saturday morning, Astro had invited another furry in the local area (Aeron, one of many people from the old IRC group he pulled me into back in grad school) to come hang out with us for the day, and so we went to breakfast and then to an entertainment center with escape rooms, minigolf, bowling and arcade games for a few hours, until it was time for me to drive off again for the main event. The wedding later that afternoon was extremely, magnificently astronomy nerd themed, and included what was in effect a 2-minute lecture on dark matter in the middle of one of the readings, had its table names themed by major observatories... and of course it was at a historic observatory itself. Yerkes was interesting; the building architecture was lovely and the telescope was also a sight to see. In between the ceremony and the dinner a somewhat eccentric observatory employee gave a tour/presentation of the historic dome, which inexplicably involved him tossing a cardboard cutout of Albert Einstein off the elevated catwalk onto the dome floor near the end. I stuck around until about 10pm (having to go easy on the drinks since I would be driving) and then set off back to Astro's house.

On Sunday it was finally time to return home - I was dropped off the airport midafternoon, followed by a very short flight to Chicago and a much longer one to London.

I'd had a few doubts going into this trip; it would be a long way to travel, was timed awkwardly at the start of the semester, and would involve a lot of driving back and forth that I wasn't looking forward to. However, I'm extremely happy I was able to do it - not only was the friend who got married very happy that I was able to make it all that way, but I was also able to reconnect with some of my other old friends from almost two decades ago. The other grad school friend who attended the wedding wants me to give a talk at UC Davis where he now works; Astro is now talking about attending MFF (for the first time in probably 10 years). I also had a good time in general, and even if it sets me back for a few days (or longer) at work I think the benefits will be far more enduring.

After one of the warmest summers in memory the turn to autumn has been swift and severe - the past week has seen much cooler temperatures and lashing rain almost every day. It's been a similar story at work; the relatively relaxed August period is now long-gone and the ramp up to the semester is in full swing.

Classes don't begin until next week, but my teaching duties started today. The reason for this is that I agree to take over as "programme leader" of our Master's degree program in data science. I've been teaching on this degree since I joined the university (I teach the statistics module), but earlier in the year it was proposed that I take over the degree entirely. This can be seen as something of a promotion, but like most academic promotions it doesn't come with extra compensation or anything like that. I agreed to do it anyway, for a few different reasons. First - there was no other natural person to take over (if I declined, it would go to someone completely unfamiliar with the degree). Second - they offered to remove a bunch of my other responsibilities (more on that some other time). Third - I have been dissatisfied with a few different aspects of the degree for a while, and this is a position where I'll be able to actually bring about changes on matters I otherwise have little control over.

So I'm now in charge, and this means that this week I had to prepare and give today's in-class "induction" presentation to the students welcoming them to the university and laying out their expectations. Most important among them: clear statements about allowed and disallowed usage of AI, which is becoming an increasing problem for us (and which were entirely absent from last year's guidance). Over the past week I've also been busy marking recent Master's theses and conducting viva exams for students finishing their degree this year, and more than a few of them show obvious signatures of being mostly or entirely AI-composed. We will fail these students, of course, but it's infuriating to me that students even think they can get away with using a plagiarism engine as a substitute for a written thesis that is supposed to require 600 hours of work. Dealing with this is probably just the reality of our times, but maybe if we set their expectations now it will at least slightly diminish the risk of this in the future. (I also plan to lean on the instructors of the other classes to be more explicit in their AI usage guidelines and alert to students who are skirting the rules.)

The resumption of cheap flights between Liverpool and Berlin has once again enabled me to take short-notice weekend trips over to Germany just about whenever I feel like it, and this week afforded a great opportunity to do so. I had been talking with some friends earlier in the year about the possibility of doing Eurofurence in Hamburg, which ran over the past week. Unfortunately that never fully materialized: other friends were noncommittal, hotels were expensive and not particularly close to the con, flights to Hamburg would also be expensive and involve a long connection... and so on. However a few weeks ago Lupestripe proposed a different idea: the same period is Berlin Beer week, and the organizers of that were holding craft beer cruises on the River Spree on Friday and Saturday. After seeing that flights to Berlin were still only £75 I booked tickets almost immediately (while Lupe arranged the tickets for the Saturday evening beer cruise), and so on Friday I made my way over to Liverpool airport for another quick and easy flight to Germany.

Lupe and Wolfie were already out on the town when I arrived - conveniently near Ostkreuz, the first stop on the airport line. We met up at the station and made our way to a couple of bars: one in Ostkreuz followed by a place named "Space Medusa" with a jellyfish-in-space decor theme. This bar was hosting a guest event by an Amsterdam brewery, one of the leaders of which ended up chatting with us on and off for much of the night. We left a little after 1am and were back in Spandau around 3am.

I woke up around 11am and we set out early afternoon to a chicken restaurant for a late lunch / early dinner in advance of the beer cruise. My longtime friend Sandy met us there and we were able to briefly catch up before she had to return home to pack for her upcoming trip to Greece, while Lupe, Wolfie and I made our way to the dock on the Spree where the boat was waiting for us. While in the queue to get on board, Lupe befriended a Norwegian man just ahead of us, who turned out to be the owner of one of the breweries being featured on the cruise. Once boarding started he rushed ahead to check in on his kegs while Lupe, Wolfie and I went to the top deck to secure a seat at a table more or less in the exact middle of the boat.

The cruise set off at 6pm under idyllic conditions - 20 C, clear skies, the sun low just down the river while the Alexanderplatz TV tower sparkled behind the buildings on one side. Two Canadians (it was ambiguous whether they were friends, colleagues, or romantic partners) joined us at the table, leaving one spot that was in turn filled by the Norwegian brewer, who was there on his own (this was a business trip for him, of course). Despite Lupe and I wearing extremely obvious furry attire the others didn't mind at all and there was a good on-and-off conversation as the boat smoothly made its way upriver away from the city, winding past various interesting landmarks and buildings. The beer was all-you-can-drink (while supplies lasted!) although I tried to pace myself, sipping the 0.2l pours slowly and taking advantage of the free water and cola in between. The boat made it as far as Köpenick (coincidentally the place Lupe and I had visited the last time I was in town) before turning around and gradually making its way back the other direction towards the docks, as the sun set in front of us and the full moon rose behind us. We reached the dock at 9pm and disembarked in good spirits.

An "afterparty" had been advertised at a brewery in the north part of town, and after a moment's pause to consider getting food (we didn't bother in the end) we made our way up there, although unfortunately they had just closed their guest keg lineup when we arrived and were just doing regular bar service. But they had plenty of good stuff and the weather was nice, so we grabbed our beers and sat down. After a little while our new Norwegian friend also appeared and sat down with us, and not long after that the Dutch brewer we met at Space Medusa walked by and decided to join us for a little while as well. Eventually he had to go pack up, but the rest of us continued chatting and the Norwegian invited us to attend next year's beer festival in Bodø, Norway (which we are now actually seriously considering). Eventually we called it a night and bid goodbye to the Norwegian while the rest of us made our way by to Lupe and Wolfie's place in Spandau, somehow arriving a little earlier and less drunk than the previous night.

Sunday was a relatively chill day - we'd discussed making a day trip to Poland but as there wasn't much to actually see there that made sense for an afternoon trip, we settled on staying in Berlin. Lupe and I first went to an old railyard that had been reclaimed by the forest during the Berlin Wall period and is now a nature park; we took a walk from one end to the other on the rail tracks, then continued on our way towards the Berlin Chili Festival that was going on in the southeast part of the city. We realized that the nearest S-bahn stop was the same one that served the Eurofurence hotel back when EF was in Berlin, so for old times' sake we made a slight detour there to have a drink in the nearly-empty biergarten by the canal outside. Then we continued onto the Chili Festival that was going on in the yard outside the Berliner Burg brewery, where we sampled various sauces and I had some super-spicy German dumplings (and some more beer). We hopped on the bus to visit a nearby city hall where JFK gave his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, sat down for another drink in a nearby park, and then made our way back west to an Ethiopian restaurant we'd picked out for dinner. From there we moved onto a nearby bar for one final drink before returning to Spandau. After a brief wind-down watching Youtube I crashed at the relatively early time of 1am in preparation for my unfortunately-early wakeup to catch the train to the airport the next morning.

All in all it was a great trip - certainly I was far more relaxed compared to my high-strung period in June, and the weather was positively idyllic. The only downside is that I'm now truly entering the busy period at work, and after three days essentially offline there is a lot to catch up with. No regrets, though!

Tuesday and Wednsday of this week featured a short conference in Oxford: an invite-only "workshop" to discuss the future of searching for visible counterparts to gravitational waves detected by the laser interferometers. On Monday after lunch I hopped on the train and made my way down, reaching the town just before dinner.

This was (somehow) my first time in Oxford, even though I've been working as an academic in the UK for more than 8 years. Until recently the university was not really active in either of my subfields (supernovae and GRBs) at all, but that changed a few years ago when they poached a Northern Ireland academic. Amusingly enough he then (in 2022) tried to encourage me to also apply for a faculty position there - I assume he saw me as ideal as a sort of deputy junior faculty in his area - but after the position was posted they ended up going for far more senior candidates and I was never even interviewed.

But, back to the present - the early-arrivals had arranged to meet up at a big local pub and of course I headed straight there after checking into my university accommodation, which was in a more modern building adjoining the ancient (1540s) Christ Church college quad. The conference itself was held in the same modern building, and was a decent if at times unexciting meeting, since the main reason for the workshop was to discuss the lack of any good observational candidates coming out of this LIGO observing run and what that meant for the future. I'd been asked to "give a talk or lead a discussion" and chose the latter, although I somewhat regretted it since my proposed topic got mashed in with someone else's for us to lead jointly, and I gave him too much freedom to drive the agenda and I'm not sure he did a good job sparking useful/interesting discussion.

The most fun part of the visit, though, was the other part of the college we got to use - the "Great Hall" that served as the venue for breakfast each day and dinner on Tuesday night. The fancy British universities are of course famous for their opulent architecture/decor and silly pretentious traditions and we certainly got that: this venue was lined with gleaming oil painting portraits of famous alumni, including various royalty and political figures going back to the 1600s on every wall, as well as lines of gargoyles and crests and all the rest of it. The Oxford and Cambridge colleges also were the inspiration for Harry Potter, and while obviously I knew that in advance the similarity to some of the movie scenes felt uncanny, and a quick google search confirmed that the Christ Church Great Hall (and its entry stairs) in fact was the direct model that was mocked up to create the set of some of the most iconic scenes from those films. So that was kind of amusing. (The college also clearly milks this fame, as each day there were what appeared to be Potter fan tourists around, the most peculiar variety of which seemed to be young to middle aged women in Potter-style robes but skimpy outfits underneath snapping selfies, presumably for some sort of weird influencer content. We live in strange times.)

Now, unfortunately on the second day of the conference I got some rather unwelcome news - the competing team that I knew was probably writing up a paper on the event that I've been devlting most of my limited research time to since last October (and the focus of the past few weeks in particular) submitted and posted their own papers on the object, effectively scooping me. It's not a disaster as our data are still better and I made some good solid progress over the past month and am in shooting distance of completion myself, but it certainly removes some of the novelty and now amplifies the urgency just as my travel schedule is picking up again and the academic year is about to start. But at least I won't lack for motivation in the coming weeks...

Another year of my life has ticked by. My birthday conveniently landed on a weekend again this year - although unfortunately there was no huge regional furmeet conveniently planned on the day for me (as there was last year), so I was obligated to come up with my own plans. I settled on a fairly simple evening out, and poked a few friends about it and made plans for dinner with a group of six or so in Manchester on Sunday.

One friend I invited (Baloki) had already made plans for the weekend, but was feeling bad about missing the occasion so he kindly offered to come visit me separately on Friday evening. He drove over from Manchester in the afternoon and met me at the after-work pub, and we continued onto a Korean restaurant on Bold Street for dinner. Amusingly, while we were seated another mutual friend of ours (Doveux) poked him about their usual Manchester Friday pub plans and after being told we were in Liverpool, Doveux decided to just make a spontaneous trip over for the evening. We met up at my flat, sampled the cake Baloki had picked up at a local bakery for me, then went to a local quirky pub for a drink before Baloki left to drive back home. Doveux then crashed at my place for the night before heading back on the train the next morning.

Sunday was the day of my actual birthday. The dinner ended up being much bigger than planned, since it turned that another fur in Manchester was also celebrataing his birthday, shared lots of mutual friends with me, and proposed coordinating to arrange dinner (and pre-dinner drinks) together. I went along with that, and our groups assembled at Brew Dog around 5pm before making our way to the booking at a pizza place at 6pm. After that we split up, with the other group making their way over to karaoke (they invited me to join as well but I absolutely was not having that xP) while my crew walked over to a cocktail bar in the Northern Quarter for a couple more drinks there before calling it a night around 10pm.

Aside from being a chance to celebrate, birthdays (at least for me) inevitably end up being an occasion to reflect and consider: after all, as the years behind me increase the years ahead of me correspondingly decrease, so is life where I want it to be? And this has definitely been a year of my life that's provided fodder for consideration.

It's now been a few months since the emotional whirlwind of April, May and June and outwardly things are reverted to their pre-2024 baseline. I sleep mostly normally and can focus on work and so on. The past does linger, though: we remain in touch and nominally friends... but these interactions are so different from they way they were before it's always a little bit sad, and by engaging this way I sometimes feel like I'm buying into a narrative of the past in which nothing more had ever happened.

But in the long run that's really only a minor detail at this point. More fundamentally I need to understand where to go from here. When everything went down I tried to comfort myself with the notion that I at least now knew kind of what a relationship felt like, that it could be a good experience, and that I could at least partially chip away at broader family/social expectations that would make a somewhat nonconventional relationship harder. After all, I'd almost ended up having truly solved my long-running dilemma (without even expending any effort), failing in the end only by something of a fluke coincidence. But admittedly a more dismal interpretation is setting in, which is that this end result was probably inevitable, and the same factors that made it so will be similarly fatal for virtually any future prospective relationship. Indeed, the intersection of "people I could tolerate spending indefinitely long amounts of time with", "people who would could tolerate spending indefinitely long amounts of time with me", "people who can deal with being more than friends, yet are not seeking either a sexual or romantic relationship", and "people who are available" is probably zero. Or if it's not absolutely zero, the chances are sufficiently low that expending effort on it makes little sense and that time would be better invested on work or hobbies or something else. Which is in effect doubling down on my long-running (and broadly unsuccessful) strategy for life in general, but maybe it really was the best approach.

Anyway, it's not as if I necessarily have to decide now, and of course I could just have a stroke of luck in a few years if the right person comes along (and this time things do not end in a way that leads to months of lingering pain and frustration). In the meantime, as another asexual friend I've been conversing a lot with lately about our respective sad experiences points out: "work is always there for you".

Returning from my big summer trip earlier than normal this year has made the summer feel strangely slow-moving: while the start of the academic year (and all the business and responsibilities that accompany) feels imminent, the start of teaching is still almost four weeks away even now.

I've been trying to use the time as productively as possible - this long stretch is a very rare time to actually do research properly and focus on a single task, and I have a task that very much needs focusing on (writing the paper on a spectacular event we found last September). Focusing on my mind on that has not always been as easy as I would like, but I've had a few good all-day streaks of research work and am making decent progress.

I've still been able to get out on the weekends, though, and each of the past two has offered some fun activities. Last Saturday (the 16th) was the Yorkshire Furs summer party, which was again held in Sheffield. While it didn't quite match the previous year when it fell on my birthday, I still had a good time fursuiting and talking and milling about before taking the last train of the evening back to Liverpool.

This past weekend was a holiday weekend and it offered an opportunity for something much bigger: a trip to Scotland to climb the UK's highest mountain, Ben Nevis. Skavi and Dorje were eager to do this, with the nominal motivation being Dorje's new hobby of setting up a radio communication system on mountains to collect "points" on amateur radio leaderboard. I reserved the hotel and Skavi rented the car, and on Friday after work and pub I made my way over to their place in Warrington to crash for the night and then begin the drive very early the next morning, up the motorway to Glasgow and then through the windy Highland roads to our destination.

We arrived mid-afternoon and checked into the "cheap" hotel (£100/night, half the price of almost anything else in town) I'd reserved, which despite being composed of cheaply-constructed cabins in the parking lot of an abandoned hotel, turned out to be perfect (quiet and comfortable I had my own little room to sleep in). We did some exploration of Fort William, a sea town right next to the mountain, and got dinner at the amusingly named "Fishy Fish" restaurant, which had a fancy dining room right over a ground-floor chippy (which sold the same things for the same price).

Sunday was when we actually climbed the mountain. Unsurprisingly the trail was incredibly busy, jammed in particular by a tour group of about 150 people that were all going at once, at quite a slow pace. But we managed to get past them by reaching the lake at the 500 meter level and had relative peace until reaching the summit (which was thronged by several hundred people). Unfortunately the weather was not as cooperative as one would like: the cloud level was about 1000 meters, and while we had good views for the first 2/3 of the way up the summit itself was totally weathed in fog, with no views anywhere. We'd made excellent time getting up there and Dorje had finished his radio contact by 11:15, so we decided to continue the fun by descending off the other side of the mountain and down to the arete linking Ben Nevis to a nearby high mountain, Carn Mor Deargh. I'd been a little apprehensive about this but it was actually a lot of fun, scramping down the rocky slope and then along an extremely narrow ridge with sharp drops on either side for the better part of a mile. The only downside was that the fog was still with us the whole way, continuing to obscure the magnificent views that we only got brief (seconds-long) glimpses of through rare gaps in the cloud in one direction or another. We continued from there down the valley, back to the lake, and returned to the car at around 7:45pm, finishing 21km of total distance over the course of the day. There was just barely enough time to make it back to the restaurant by our hotel for dinner before crashing.

On Monday we did a short hike up to an overlook above the famous Lake Ness before driving back, reaching my place just before midnight.

All in all a fantastic trip! I hope I have more chances to do things like this again in the near future.

My flight back to the UK was not entirely uneventful this time; after boarding the plane in Denver we were held at the gate for an extra two hours before we could finally take off due to some issue with the airline's baggage IT system. But, we made it out eventually and I touched down Thursday a little before noon.

I wasn't in a hurry to get home, because indeed I wasn't yet going home - rather than taking the usual train to Liverpool, I instead boarded a different train north towards the town of King's Lynn in Norfolk. There were more delays on the train, but I eventually got to my destination, and I took a short walk around town before crashing for the night (and thankfully, sleeping soundly for 11 hours).

The occasion for being in this part of the country was to attend a wedding - my graduating PhD student was also getting married this summer and invited me to come, an invitation which I accepted. The location for the event was a manor out in the countryside, about an hour by bus from King's Lynn. I arrived a little over an hour early, so I went for a short walk towards the shore (I didn't quite make it) and back before returning to see most of the attendees already hitting the bar and throwing back beer and cocktails (this is when I discovered that British weddings involve a lot of drinking). We proceeded out to the garden where the ceremony was conducted in perfect mild weather and sunshine, followed after a time by the dinner and eventually the reception/dance back in front of the bar.

I was a little worried that this might be an awkward event for me, since I would be a somewhat conspicuously single middle-aged person at a wedding of two people not much more than half my age, and I knew no one other than the groom and one groomsman. And this was true to an extent, but it wasn't a bad kind of awkward; the ceremony was a very nice one and there was so much happiness all around it's hard not to have a good time, plus my student seemed genuinely glad that I had come (or at least, he told me so at least three or four times!) Also, things picked up later in the evening when some of the other PhD students from out department showed up for the afterparty (though I did more actual dancing than any of them, lol). Getting back to my hotel was a bit of a chore (the Uber app consistently said there would be a driver available to me pick up within 10 minutes... but when I actually requested one this was revealed to be a lie, and I had to call a taxi company and wait another 30 minutes for a pickup). In any case, I still got back to my hotel by a reasonable time.

Conveniently enough, the very next day was the London furmeet and the way my train tickets worked it was most convenient to return through London - which meant I was able to make a stop there for almost the entirety of the event. While the event was much smaller than normal and there was almost no one there I knew (and I was without my fursuit), I was able to eventually strike up conversations with a bunch of people I'd never talked to before, so I still had a good time before leaving at 6:30 to finally return home to Liverpool.

The final phase of my trip was the usual summer visit to friends and family in New Mexico. I left Tucson very early in the morning on Thursday to make a quick connection in Phoenix, and touched down in Albuquerque just before lunch.

My mom had come up to Albuquerque to pick me up from the airport and get lunch (and then coffee after, as we had time to kill). She then headed back down to Socorro but I stayed in Albuquerque, first to go on a short hike and have dinner with my graduate school friend (V.) who now lives in town, and then to visit my brother at his place.

I've not visited my brother in quite a few years - I would normally crash there prior to covid, but during 2020 his girlfriend moved in and she didn't want overnight visitors, so over the past four years I've just been staying with my friend V. while in town instead. But my brother and his girlfriend broke up a few months ago (she was possessive and mean in other ways and my brother eventually summoned the fortitute to cut if off) so it once again became possible to crash there. Indeed, it felt like a potential sibling bonding opportunity; I've never been very close to him (indeed, we have clashed at times) and in many ways we've defined ourselves in opposition to each other... but we had both gone through difficult experiences of a similar nature in the past few months.

And indeed that visit went pretty well - I saw him both Thursday night, Friday morning, and Friday night, and unlike his 2010s self (when he would just stay in his room the whole time I visited) he was somewhat social and willing to interact, even if it was just asking if I wanted to watch the streaming shows that he was going to watch anyway. But he did talk about his experience, and I talked about mine, and that was... something. (In the meantime I was also able to see my other Albuquerque friends, Sabot and Winter.)

The big family event was over the weekend, though. On Saturday my parents drove to Albuquerque to pick up me and my brother and continue onto Santa Fe, where they'd booked a reservation at an extremely fancy restaurant. The occasion: it was their 50th wedding anniversary. A pretty big deal, and even more so because they are both still healthy and happily together to this day. I'd been looking forward to it a lot, and as family experiences go it was quite a pleasant one, with everybody in pretty good spirits. My brother and I paid for the whole thing (via secret agreement in advance)! I then came back with them to Socorro, and on Sunday we had the second round of anniversary celebrations: my parents invited about 25 of their friends over to the house for an evening party, with cake and sparkling wine. And while it was mostly older people, that was quite pleasant as well. I do feel lucky that my parents are such good and pleasant people, that they've been such a positive experience on my life, and (especially) that they are still here for me today.

I stayed around in Socorro for a couple more days, though I didn't get up to much - I'd been hoping to go hiking or something, but the weather was swelteringly hot even in the nearby mountains (and my dad was busy at work). Given the short period I didn't feel too obligated to work and mostly ended up just chilling at home, not doing very much (other than chatting with friends online a bit).

I would have liked to have stayed longer (six days is definitely less than my usual summer visit to the state), but with an event back in the UK to return to at the end of the week this visit had to remain a short one this year, so earlier today I was back up in Albuquerque and I'm now on my way back to the UK - if not quite back at home quite yet.

The second stop in my four-part US trip was Pasadena for my traditional visit to Caltech, my old postdoc institute and the center of my primary scientific collaboration. I was there for just under a week, from last Monday until Sunday - after which I flew onward to the third stop (Tucson, Arizona) and was there until yesterday.

My two younger students and I were on the same Southwest flight from San Jose to Burbank last Monday, and as soon as we disembarked we hopped in a taxi to make our way to a collaborator's extremely nice house in Bel Air, one of the richest parts of town. This collaborator (Prof. R) was the formal principal investigator for the Lick observing run we just attended, and he'd invited us (and some prominent Pasadena scientists, Professor K and his students, and the director of Carnegie Observatories) to a small house party at his place. We had dinner there outside and mostly listened to Prof K engage in arguments/debates about early 20th century astronomy and Caltech history before it grew late and we were given rides back to Pasadena with the other participants.

I was again staying with one of my old grad school friends who is now a JPL staff scientist - because of the party I had to apologize for a somewhat late arrival around 10pm, but he and his fiancee were still awake and I was able to have a quick conversation before bed. It was good to catch up with him, although I ended up having far less time to do so than I anticipated - we got dinner on Tuesday night after I returned from campus, and he joined me and my students for dinner again the following night, but on Wednesday he left to attend an overnight birthday party at a friend's house and then woke up with covid the next day, and he decided to stay there rather than drive home sick (only to possibly infect me anyway)... and he remained quite sick the rest of the week, which meant for the remainder of the visit (Thursday through Sunday) I was alone at his place, since his fiancee had also left town! Or, actually, I was not entirely alone - once again I was there with their extremely cute cat, who had the same weird behavioral quirks as last time (acting very affectionate and attention-seeking, but refusing to allow being pet, and occasionally launching into a random biting attack).

The visit to the astronomy department at Caltech went well - there were no project breakthroughs, but as usual it was worth the time to come by and share ideas and learn about my collaborators' plans. (It was also a chance to help my younger students network a bit, even though they weren't working as closely with anyone in the group there.) I was able to get a bonus tour of the basement labs where they build new devices for telescopes, which was interesting as well - even though I'd worked in that building for four years I'd never actually been down to see what was happening there, and they have lots of ongoing projects (for Keck, and a proposed Antarctic telescope to survey in the infrared).

The weekend ended up being pretty quiet (I'd been hoping to catch up with my friend but he didn't recover in time to return to his place before I needed to leave), but at least this offered a chance to get some work done preparing my presentation for the next stop in my trip (Tucson). The occasion for that trip was the Rubin Community Workshop, a meeting to discuss all aspects of the huge new observatory the US research community is building in Chile - and after 20 years of development is finally complete and beginning operations. This will have a lot of relevance to my work so I figured it was time to attend a meeting and see how their progress was going and start to plan the next steps in my own research.

I haven't been to Tucson in years and years - the last time was probably 2001 or 2002, when I visited as part of an internship program. It being the dead of summer and my time being limited (I was actually only attending half the conference) I didn't have any specific plans to see the city or do anything in the area, though - this was pretty much purely a conference/networking event.

It was good, though - preparing for the conference was a useful exercise in thinking about the future itself, and I was able to catch up with a number of other collaborators there, register my own interest in the project, and learn about its current status - which will help (I hope) for the next round of grant proposals.

The conference ran all week, but I only was there for three days - this morning it's time for yet another short flight, this time to New Mexico for a long-needed week catching up with friends and family.

Traditionally I take at least one long trip back to the US where I try to roll as many things as possible - friends, collaborators, family, and maybe a conference - into a single international trip, and this year's iteration of that started just under two weeks ago. The first stop: the SF Bay Area, mostly for vacation but also for work.

After my student's viva last Monday (which set the boundary condition for the start of this trip) I hopped on a train to London Tuesday morning for a flight out on Tuesday afternoon, which took me to San Francisco. My longtime friend there (Mynx) picked me up at the airport and we had a quick dinner near his old place on the Peninsula side of the bay before continuing on to his current residence in Hayward.

I had a busy social itinerary for the rest of the week, starting on Wednesday when I met Rikoshi for lunch and a drink (and maybe another drink, and another drink after that...) in San Jose before I was picked up by an old grad school friend to hang out for the remainder of the afternoon, followed by dinner, followed by a movie night with a group of furries at a house elsewhere in San Jose.

Thursday was my visit to Berkeley (which was somewhat overdue, as I didn't quite have time last year and had to cut short the previous year when I got stuck all day at the DMV). Most of the afternoon was spent on UC Berkeley campus visiting time-domain group on campus, which ended up being entirely people who arrived long after I graduated (I was hoping to meet my PhD advisor, but I got his out-of-office mail when I contacted and inferred he was out of town, although it emerged later he had actually returned that day and was at work, but didn't bother to let me know, which is not entirely surprising). But before that I did get to walk around town for a while exploring places I hadn't seen since pre-pandemic (they felt fairly run-down), and following my obligatory campus meetings I met up with a couple of graduate school friends at a local brew pub for drinks and burgers, which was pleasant.

I was sufficiently efficient with my visits to local furries on Wednesday that I actually didn't have much to do on Friday and ended up just hanging out at my friend's place for most of the morning and afternoon, but at 5pm I convinced a few friends (Dax, Fyl, and Tachi) to drop by for a short hike in the hills behind Mynx's place, followed by dinner and board games. On Saturday Mynx, his housemate Hours, and I went over to Mountain View to watch the new Superman movie, and then went to meet up with Dade to see his Burning Man project and then pick him up to drive to Halfmoon Bay for dinner at a brew pub by the ocean.

And then on Sunday it was time for the "work" part of this visit - I was dropped at the airport to meet my younger two PhD students, pick up a rental car, and drive up to Lick Observatory. Or at least, that was the plan: a hitch quickly emerged, in that the car company (Avis) claimed that the rate the university-contracted travel agency had booked my rental with was some tourist rate exclusive to people with non-US driver's licenses (even though the documents I'd been sent completely contradicted this). The agent at the counter said I had to change the rate but she was unable to do so; the travel agency said they had no way to change the rate; after an hour and a half of bouncing back and forth (and racking up a very expensive roaming phone call) no solution was found and I gave up and rented a car on my own credit card with a different agency.

After a drive up the mountain with a stop for groceries and to pick up burgers, we arrived at the observatory at 4:30, very shortly before they closed the historic dome for visitors, so I and my students headed up there to check that out before closing time. We then went over to the 3-meter telescope dome for our scheduled appointment to get the students oriented with the facility and the instrument - the nominal purpose of the whole trip for them, in order to secure permission for them to observe remotely from the UK in the future. That, plus calibrations (and a brief walk around the summit area at sunset) took the rest of the evening and then observing commenced. The experience was a little bit nostalgic - I'd used the telescope quite a few times over the course of my PhD at Berkeley but I hadn't been to the summit in probably 15 years, so it was a fun experience to be back after all that time. On top of that, my first PhD student (who graduated in 2020 and has, since then, been a postdoc at UC Santa Cruz) came up for the evening to meet my students and to chat, which was nice as well.

I went to bed around 3am, leaving the students to finish off the night independently (PhD supervisor priveleges!) Shortly after noon the next day (Monday) we then met up to take the windy road back down the mountain to return the car and hop on a flight to Southern California for the next phase of the visit, which hopefully I'll be able to describe here tomorrow.

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January 2026

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Procyon

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