Updates

My blogging has sort of fallen to the wayside since I started using Twitter. If you want to keep up with what I'm doing day to day (and don't mind a bit lower signal-to-noise ratio), check out my Twitter feed. You can follow along without signing up, but it's more fun if you have an account and we can interact.

Here's a whirlwind tour of the last three months for me:

Work

Work with ANDRILL is still going well. I seem to be doing something different each day, which is some times nice and some times a burden. I've got enough projects (both internal and external collaborations) going to keep me busy around the clock. I have to re-interview for my position in June (which I'm told is just a formality). Such is the way of university politics and being dependent on public funding, I guess.

My traveling has slowed down somewhat. I was in Lincoln in November, San Francisco in December for AGU, and Wellington, NZ this month for a meeting. I currently have no trips in the forseeable future, though they have a tendency to pop up on short notice.

I've got a manuscript submitted to Computers and Geosciences that reviewed favorably. Hopefully one more short round of revisions and it will be published. Then I can move on to the several papers that are in the 'needs revision' or 'just plain needs writing' stage. I've not been very good about forcing myself to write.

I helped write a fairly ambitious proposal for NSF's CDI solicitation. We're still waiting to hear how it reviewed, but it would be a lot of fun work if funded.

Personal

Things are still going well for Elizabeth at work. The last 3 months have been comparatively 'easy' for her. Easy being relative but she's not had as many rotations which require to spend the night at the hospital on call. Currently she's back into the call rotations, so she's gone every 4 days or so--she tells me it's payback for all of my travel.

The house is still standing. We had a minor pipe freeze a couple months back before we realized that there was an on/off lever for heating the basement. As you can probably guess, it was off. No problems since.

We're hoping to put in a nice concrete patio out back this spring. This step 1 of our renovation plans. Step 2 is to replace the bank of windows in the basement with a set of French doors to walk out onto the patio. Step 3 is to convert some space in the basement to a proper bathroom with a shower. Once all that is done, we can start looking at gutting and renovating the bathroom upstairs. Well down the road will be kitchen.

We're all excited here for spring. Bella likes the snow but it will be nice to be able to take her to the lake for a swim. It'll also be nice to setup the hammock again so I can blog from the backyard. I think it's going to be a busy spring cleaning up things around the yard that we didn't get done last fall.

I'm still brewing beer. Right now I've got a Strong Ale and a Brown Ale (my own recipe) bottled and the rest of the brown on tap. There's a Maibock fermenting away in one of my primaries and something (can't remember it offhand) on deck to brew probably in a week or two. I'm also still exploring single malt Scotches. I've got a bottle of Lagavulin 16YO that Elizabeth gave me for Christmas and a bottle of The Macallan 12YO open at the moment. Between the beer on tap, the whisky, and the new patio, this should be a fun place to grill out this summer.

That's probably enough for now. I need to blog more often, if only to avoid these long rambling posts.