Time Management of the first year of Professoring

This year I have been diligent about logging my time with Toggl. It is a way to get a feeling for how much time I have spent on various activities. Obviously it is only as good as my log habits so it is not terribly fine grained but it does give me a picture on what I have spent a lot of time and on which activities I spent a reasonable amount.

First shocker: I logged on average 60 hours a week this year. No wonder I felt less than 100% efficient! That is impossible to keep up for even 40! So yeah. That is a first thing I would like to change if possible. Lower the number of hours working. And focus more when I do.

Secondly, here is the breakdown of the full year:



Percentages can be computed out of the 3000 hr I logged. Not a lot of the logged time is not work but some of the gray "other" is house purchases or "sad lunch by myself".
Note how much time telescope/grant proposal writing ate up. Now some of that effort is recyclable: the observing proposal becomes the introduction to the paper on the data or similar but it is a remarkable amount of time. With varying return of course. I spent a lot of time on NASA NSPIRES proposals (including getting them submitted by our budget office) and nothing to show for it.
I like proposal writing but this is a lot of time spent trying to get photons/$$. May need to learn how to streamline it some more. Or better triage up front.

Science is not just me sciencing or writing papers. This category includes telecoms about scientific project: the LADUMA PI telecom, the LSST telecom etc. And converting student reports into publishable papers. So that is all science but may not feel all the time like sciencing.

I doubts the commitment for teaching is going to go down anytime soon. I have set up my courses the way I want them organized but now comes fixing the bugs I noticed teaching these classes for the first time. And of course a lot of the teaching/prep category is simply grading and admin. Neither of those show any promise of going faster.

I did a similar post earlier after 6 months. It looks similar. I do object to the 60hr/week though. That needs fixing. Suggestions as to how are very welcome.

The second semester

Thesecond semester asa prof is done. Can I get an "Amen! haleluja!"? Between writing grant proposals with nextto nothing in the tank, a relelntless teaching schedule and still pressures to do all teh things, it was quite the ride.

To begin with, it has been a banner year checking off the boxes that one needs to check as a starting associate prof: HST time ($), hired a kick-ass postdoc, took on students for projects, applied for NASA and NSF funding, gave colloquia, developed a phd project with a student that led to a successful Kentucky space grant, etc etc.

So many different balls to keep in the air. I could tell from a variety of clues that the stress had been getting to me (small infections take forever to heal, an involuntary muscle twitch, insomnia...ok these were not subtle).

So the next priority will be to increase efficiency on teaching/logistics. Not with the aim to do more mind you. To decrease stress. Just that.

In that particular vein, i discovered this awesome present from Matt among our things in boxes:

So that concludes a year at uol. Curious to see how 2018 will go.

Science Twitter

I joined twitter a while ago. It is a great tool to learn what other people are doing and to send small BB's of encouragement to other people. The other day I stuck my neck out and asked for help with research on Elliptical galaxies. I have a student with a keen interest in galaxy-galaxy strong gravitational lensing. I had to get up-to-date with these and especially where we could make a difference.

Twitter responded in awesome fashion. And even better, Jackie Monkowiez put it all in a Storify:
Best Twitter Thread Ever!

These are some of the suggested papers:

The Great Big Review Paper
Renzini+ 2006
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.astro.44.051905.092450

Graham+ 2013
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013pss6.book...91G

Ongoing discussion on the Initial Mass Function in these following papers:

Cappellari+ 2016
https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.04267

Lyubenova+ 2016
https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.07448

Smith+ 2014
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014MNRAS.443L..69S

Conroy & van Dokkum+ 2012
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012ApJ...760...70V
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2012ApJ...760...71C/abstract

and also there were these papers:

Schombert+ 2009/2015
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015AJ....150..162S
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009ApJ...699.1530S

Bender+ 1993a,b
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1992ApJ...399..462B
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1993ApJ...411..153B

Faux Emergency

Two things that have always sort of annoyed me with academic culture is the interruptions and the faux emergency. The two are related.

First, there is an underlying understanding that if you are on your office, you are approachable. Some academic institutions have an open door culture where no one closes the door. This is impossible right now with a busy lecture room right outside my door. Even with the door closed it's plenty distracting. One thing that I really like about the new place is the fact that everyone knocks. It's a little thing but it allows me to disengage and focus on the visitor. Want me to do a thing? Knock on the door first.

Secondly is the faux emergency. This happens when a deadline or requirement has been poorly communicated and suddenly it's an emergency. Not only am I now interrupted for a thing but a "drop everything and do this RIGHT NOW".

So tempted to blow this sort of thing off. The issue is however often that if I do, it's some poor student that suffers. These are often not the creators of the faux emergency however.

These two issues completely shred my ability to do much focused work (e.g. Writing) during business hours.

Writing

I had a student come up to me and we ended up chatting about writing assignments. He was doing the same what I heard enough in college "when am I going to use this skill in the real world?"

All the time.

I can now confidently say 90% of my job is creative writing/editing to some degree of creativity (minimum is grant reports, maximum creativity is for expense reports ;)
But nearly all is creative stuff. This is why I have been mildly jealous of those in science who could write well. Not just sufficient but with clarity and, my favorite, brevity.

At this stage I would be happy to write okay and fast. Faster at any rate.
I want those grant proposals written, the homework and exams, oh and finish that paper, and edit that student's paper.

It never ends though. Keep truckin.

Insomnia

It seems do be a particular academic thing to have insomnia. Big brain will not shut off. And it sort of meshes with the "I-am-so-busy-I-cannot-afford-sleep" toxic attitude.

Last night was insomnia once again for me. Not so much brain cannot stop thinking insomnia ("the hamsterwheel") or anxiety dream insomnia. I just woke up at 2:30 with All Systems Red Alert. Could be an anxiety dream but it did not feel like it. Some noise must have flipped a primordeal switch reading "All AWAKE NOW".
Well I got my class for this adternoon mostly prepped.

Brain:"we should have insomnia more often!"

"shut up brain"

How cool was the worst kept secret in astronomy?

Today was the big day for LIGO amd just about every other observatory (see what I did there? LIGO is "just another observatory" now). This has been rumored on astro social media for some time now. With Hubble observing logs public and an overenthusiastic tweet to boot. Yet it made a big splash anyway. Coordinated press events, a monday news cycle almost to themselves (president is golfing). All very well done. The graphics are amazing and I can start using this whole thing for my astro 101 class. Great!

Can I cop to being a little jealous? Such an inspiring global effort. Would have loved to have been a part of it. Barring that, I'll be cheering this magnificent achievement on.

The 100% myth

One thing that is now a nodding-in-agreement topic in academia is how overworked we are. Not that it has led to meaningful evaluations of people's efforts in any way but one can get a nod of symphathy out of most people when complaining about the workload.

Something that is not so often considered is how we arrive at said workload. It happens when we (or those doing the planning for us, but let's be honest here it is us) plan for anything. Subconsciously or not, the assumed our performance is 100%. On a flat, even surface with factory settings. But we rarely function at 100%. Your car engine certainly doesn't. No one else does all the time.

R told me to aim for 70%, and expect 50% from time to time. That does make planning anything much more realistic. And my own evaluation of my performance teaching etc.

I blame all those idealized models for our poor planning model. Assume spherical professor in a vacuum with no friction from paperwork.

Sweating the small stuff. And it's all small stuff.

The expression is "Don't sweat the small stuff. And it's all small stuff". But for professors there appears to be a lot of it. I try to stay on top of all the little requests for my time "do you have a moment?" Collegues, students etc they all need "just a minute" resiltkng in a very fractured day. If I am rested I can refocus better than today when I am just super tired (teaching & public talk yesterday).

And I am trying to finish some papers that I have 99% of? Frustrating. So I am sweating the small stuff. Namely how to get rid of a flood of it. Suggestions welcome.

Focus Interrupted

This is not an insight I got to by myself but it may be worth sharing here. Academics get hired for their ability to focus on a problem. In essence do "deep work" and then institutions flood them with interruptions. All of which "just" takes five minutes (15 in reality) of their time. Never mind online distractions that Universities have nothing to do with (well helloo Twitter).

There is ample evidence that interruptions are tricky to recover from if one is doing deep or focussed work. I am finding it a bit ironic that therefore people hide in coffee shops or libraries in order to get the deep focussed work done that is the central theme on why they are getting paid. Leave work to do work.

And it opens a view in the blind spot of many administrations that recovery or abolity to focus are not given. And so the academic who works at night or in the weekend is generated. All part of a toxic mix for work/life balance. So how to keep focus (and recover focus "what was I working on?") in the face of interruptions is something I now spend time thinking about.

The more focused I work,the easier I find it to shut work off too. And thus sleep. And focus again. So. Any help on how to get there "on tge zone" reliably is appreciated.

Grant rejections.

Today my ADAS grants were rejected. So it goes. However there are grant rejections and grant rejections these days. The NASA ADAS appears to follow the model that the ERC seems to love too: reject, reject again with reasons and just to be sure send a paper rejection over the mail.

I am sure there is some sort of internal process that led to this but to the poor proposers (me in this case) it ends up coming acros like a grant agency really needs to let you know how much your proposal sucked.

Rejection ispart and parcel of academic life. And one has to be resilient in the face of it. But multiple rejection notifications for a single proposal. Seems cruel. And given the valid worry regarding mental health issues in academia, a simple fix. Just tell me what the panel liked and what it did not. Once.

Paper load

I already have a bunch of papers that need finishing. They do not need to be perfect but I would love to get some of them DONE.

I hear this is a common complaint for faculty ;)

Trick is: I have already streamlined the writing process as much as I can. Stuck it all online in Overleaf (I can edit latex on thebus with my phone!) and the references (bibdesk ftw!). And yet...a long list of editing/writing/commenting sits in my todo pile. Some of that will resolve itself (too late to contribute...) but it needs to get addressed.

So today it's paper debt time! Let's see how it goes.

The Eclipse and start of Semester 2

The great American eclipse has happend now last monday and I am just about done procrssing it.

There were all the friends coming through town to see it and we all got to connect with them. There were all the outreach I got to do in connection to this rare event. Or the fact I got to share it with my kids and family. The event itself (totality!) blew me away in terms of its emotional impact. It is really a crescendo of anticipation followed by most everyone leaving after totality.

Some of the cool stuff I got to do was the overshadowed project that used time lapse camera work of the shadow of the eclipse. That led to some media exposure in print and radio. I am now super curious how the photo will come out post-processing.

As opposed to the previous one in 1999 in souther Germany, I did not futz with my camera much and just enjoyed the spectacle. I did take one picture I am very happy with. A panorama of the all-around dusk with a silouette of Charlotte.

So that was a fun-filled weekend and monday. To be followed by a traffic filled journey home on monday night. Tuesday was when my first class on astronomy 101 started. Of course the eclipse was immediately an extra credit assignment.

No pause since. Taught first class in the Planetarium too. 100 student classes are intimidating! And the lab that goes with it is kicking off next week. More on the eclipse and teaching astro 100 level soon.

Tenure expectations

So far the semester has been hectic. It's clear that getting grants takes priority for faculty. Well at least the word grant was used a lot during my interview. So I have been compiling tips for what I need to achieve to get tenure. The goals seem deliberately vague (have to be really) so setting clear ones for yourself is key.

Tip 1: Start early writing grant proposals.
Tip 2: Write not at work. Coffee shop writing binge to get proposal done.
Tip 3: Use before/after class metric to test for gain. I got this from the AAPT workshop. Otherwise the committee will rely on student evaluations and those are a popularity contest.
Tip 4: Toggl your time to show where your effort went (for yourself and others)
Tip 5: make tenure box with accomplishments and kudos to remember things you did for tenure committee. This was a tip from a UoL beginning tenure workshop.
Tip 6: Done is better than perfect.
Tip 7: Ask for help. Someone already has a decent wheel invented and is willing to share. This goes for young faculty workshops especially. But also your colleagues.
Tip 8: Your department, your University wants you to succeed so listen carefully to what different people are saying.

That's it so far. Hope this will help someone else too.

Focus and number of projects

confession: i have too many projects/ideas. Combined with stuff that needs to happen (paperwork, various logistics) it makes for a bit of a mess if i am not focused and able to switch between projects/ideas.

So my current theory is that my brain inadvertently has generated the number of projects I can handle on a good day (good night's sleep, excellent coffee, after a run) and yet I am dealing with this number on mostly sub-optimal days.

So the trick really is to just focus on one or two, the things that need doing and successfully ignore the rest. Also, to not keep working on an idea that is less-than-productive. Putting projects and ideas in overleaf has helped with that tremendously. And the realization that just because the publication did not happen, the time was not wasted (although I feel there should be a Failed Ideas in Astronomy Journal). The code tricks learned, data downloaded or acquired will be useful elsewhere.

But today I have gone for a run (thank you Matt for activation), sat on the porch for a bit, had my coffee. Here we go...

RIP laptop

I dropped my laptop. Screen now is fuzzy and green-tinged. It had already started restarting for no particular reason (something to do with the graphics cards) so rip little old laptop. It got me through my ESA fellowship and Leiden job.

In principle this is fine since i can order a new one now but next week is WFIRST workshop at STSCI. Look out Baltimore! The whole family is going. I have always considered going to one of these with just an ipad. I guess I am now.

Research debt

In conversations with colleagues, I came across a lovely new term: "research debt". Like the hashtag #youshouldbewriting I am sure it is a motivational stick of some sort.
Because we in academia are all motivated exclusively by sticks apparently...

So yes the term irked me some but mostly because it implies that as soon as one does other duties such as teaching and family, that really was time that should be spent on research. In context it was used as the stuff one does not get to because of teaching but I dislike the implication. Mostly because the word 'debt' implies 'interest'.

Well it is summer. Time to pay off the debt.

AAPT workshop days 2 &3

We wrapped up the AAPT workshop today and it was pretty filled. For me it was onteresting how some people latched onto certain ideas or techniques that others (eg me) found wholly unappealing.

Personal style of teaching I guess. But it really was remarkable. Another mostly unspoken thing was the toxic culture that pervades physics/astronomy. I recommended toggl to all for a variety of reasoms. First to have data on your working hours. It forces yountonfocus on just one thing. And you have a graph to show where you spent your time on. Best counter to "I don't see you around the department enough". That is an hours issue (when were you at the office...?)
and importantly. I feel ok to take time off seeing how much time I spent on this semester.

We had a final discussion on diversity/inclusion. This is tricky for a white guy (from the most overrepresented nationality in astronomy) to contribute to. I just tried to listen. Some nice practical tips to do while interacting with eg students.

All in all it has been a very useful workshop. I am busy sticking all my notes in overleaf and writing my NSF AAG proposals as a sirect result of this workshop. I highly eecommend it to any astro/phys faculty (not just starting). So much of the work has been done already by the various centers and they get you up to speed in a few days!

Stuff i want to implement:

Think-pair-share in astro and phys class

tutorials (concept work sheets) in asto class

evaluate gain in my classes. Is pur children learning kind of thing. Solehing to show on tenure review (if there is improvement...)

thoughts & ideas. Lets see where it takes me.

AAPT workshop day 2

This was the first full day at the AAPT workshop for new faculty. This is a great resource for anything from developing NSF proposals to learning new teaching techniques, resources and ways to measure your progress as a college professor.

I had picked up bits and pieces from the Center for Astronomical Education workshop at a AAS and other experiences but it is very good to have it all in one place.

Some of it is a bit contradictory. For example, most speakers exalt the Interactive Learning techniques while subjecting us to high density, fast-pased lecturing.

And i hear some things I outright disagree with. Also: we were given prep homework for this thing last friday at 5pm...

lesson 1: homework assigned at this hour will not get done. Ever.

And there some other sogns of a not-so-healthy attitude to work ie references to all nighters or online meet-ups at 5pm.
no thank you. But it is a pick and match kind of workshop so I can ignore some of it.

Collating the material will be a challenge but useful. Grabbing ideas for my astronomy 101 class certainly.

Meeting up with students

I saw this comic on http://phdcomics.com/ and I was tickled and worried like all professors...

This is why I reserve a specific slot for each student. That time is theirs. If one does not do that, the above scenario starts happening.

Astroph habit

Like most professional astronomers I check the archive every day for new papers. Typically there are 40-80 papers waiting to be scanned. Even discarding all the cosmology ones (because I cannot tell it is a crackpot one or not anyway), that leaves a lot of papers that are interesting.

And it all becomes TL;DR. I file the ones that look interesting into my bibtex but I certainly cannot read them in depth. Now to remedy this, I plan to tag all the papers to relevant lines of inquiry. Maybe that will speed up the next paper writing challenge?

Not reading the arxiv is right on the myriad of things I have heard call "research debt". I think I dislike that term already but I plan to unpack it at a future post.

Oh look a shiny!

Sometimes a bit of astronomical news, a dataset or a new tool catches your eye and you just gotta chase after it. Meanwhile there are other commitments, possibly (likely) deadlines and you have to finish stuff on occasion.

And yet the shiny. I have to admit I chase the shiny more often than not. Quickest way to burn it out. Or have some sort of productive procrastination.

examples include using a self-organizing map on the catalogs of M101 to identify background galaxies, wondering how much power telescopes use and at what point it becomes viable to run them on solar panels and a big battery, etc etc

Chase the shiny (within reason). You'll learn a new thing and probably end up using it later. This is often where my ideas for a student project comes from.

Focus-switching

One of the trickier things in academia is the focus-switching between all the different tasks and the requirement to produce the kind of work which is characterized by focus aka "deep work".

As a result I have often now seen colleagues working at odd hours or pull all-nighters. I simply can't do that as I lose focus or the ability to switch with lack of sleep. Hence i try to cheat by doing things like this blog and dealing with the tides of email during little waiting moments. Waiting at U-haul for example. In the bus etc etc.

Still. How to avoid the weird hours and carve a bit of time to code/write. Suggestions welcome.

Inbox 0

Inbox 0 all stsrted with a google guy getting swamped with email and worrying about how to not drop things. Of course there is no simple solution but fearing a similar scenario, I converted to the inbox0 idea under Matt Kenworthy's guidance.

Optimistically, I named my categories "today", "this week", "this month". "Someday" and "waiting". Of course I do not get to all the things today in the "today" folder. Or maybe even this week. It is a rough idea of urgency level.

Better to use the South Africanisms "Now", "Now now", "Just now" and "Later".
Yes these are all future tense in increasing levels of urgency.

At any rate it seems to work well on one level: i have a simple system for my todo list. The general feeling I am dropping the ball by forgetting has abated some. Of course stuff ages out (well blew past THAT deadline) but part of the system is to be ok with that.

The good part is that it dovetails nicely with my commute. I sort my list on the bus and have my todo list for the rest of the day. And instead of urgency, I try to match up an item with my time/energy level.

So I am a fan so far. Of course; no email, and I am not doing the thing. So i send myself some too (Moar email) ...

Bus Activities

The University of Louisville has an arrangement with the local bus company allowing students and staff to take the bus for free. It's now a "green" initiative of course but itstartedas something to control the parking space issue on campus.

I love it. We now live pretty close to the bus line that stops right in front of work. I hate driving into work. So i have been taking the bus in and sorting email in the meantime. I will blog about my inbox 0 experiment in a future blog entry. And tweeting and facebook. Yup. Get that out of my system before work is the idea.

So now i have added blogo app on my phone to see if i can jot some thoughts down while waiting on the bus (lovely sunny day here) or bumping along to work.

Student Supervision Plan

This summer I have four (!) students doing a project with me as well as my PhD student starting on his project. I am very happy students already want to do projects with me. At UCT and Leiden, I gained some experience with student (summer) projects at various levels. Together with Matt Kenworthy, I started to formulate The Plan[tm] for a student project. These are the tricks and tips I have so far:

1. set up the data/papers/code/etc in a dropbox with the student's name.
2. set up an overleaf document wth all the writing and references on the project for the student to turn int a report. I use the MNRAS template for ease of use.
3. Set up a first meeting, draw the drop-dead date on the white board and work backwards from that. Have everyone say when they have a Thing.
4. Set up a regular (weekly) meeting at a set time. I take notes during these and I plan to put those into Evernote from now on to make them searcheable.
5. Make a separate email tab under the general student folder. Move all correspondence there.

This has many advantages. For starters, all the data/code will be in a central spot, backed up automatically. Secondly, I can check the last time the student has worked on his/her report/thesis. It allows me to rapidly convert the report into a paper manuscript without issue. There is built-in version control. All these things make supervision much easier.

The regular meeting can be big time/brain bandwidth commitment but I rather have that than that the student is stuck for longer than a few days.

I need to do this because as opposed to most professors (I'm a professor wheee!) I don't have a single topic with lots of little offshoots from the main research topic, I have lots of small projects and interests. Two students this summer will be working on overlapping galaxy pairs, one on the Milky Way from Brown Dwarf counts found in BoRG, one will be working on galaxy morphology, and one will be working on the "sustainable observatory' (power use for different observatories, when do alternative energy sources make sense?).

So lots of different stuff to keep tabs on. Hence the organization. It saves the student time and effort and gets them off to a flying start...hopefully.

Suggestions on student supervision, helping with projects, is all helpful. Please let me know!!

Focus

One of the things that ican be both exhilirating and deeply frustrating for a professional astronomer is the amount of switching that happens. One hour teach, then respond to email, write proposal, respond to more email, talk to student, what was I doing again?

It gets worse when on top of that I get tired and the first thing to go is the part of the brain that handles priorities. Suddenly spending time on a low priority is fine only to realize that I should have been working on this lecture/proposal/urgent thing.

So focus...or blog...suggestions for improvements are welcomed...

Time (well) spent

So for this past semester I've been diligently toggling my time. This is in part thanks to Matt Kenworthy, in part a desire to track what I've done so I can show it and part a way to just focus on a single thing.

I did not work at 100% efficiency at all times. Obviously. Sometimes these are hours where the tv was on and I was picking at a laptop working on a proposal or something. Honestly I am trying to get rid of "work" times like that. Either veg or not.

That being said. I was a hectic first semester with much last minute improvisation (not my favorite) and making up for earlier mistakes (even less my favorite). Yet is broke down like this:

Which is I have to say... not too bad. But keep in mind that it was ~60 hr a week. And it wasn't like I left toggl running and then just "kept idle time". That is a lot of hours worked. And a lot on other/admin. But note the 25% on grant/telescope proposal writing.

Yeah that eats up a lot of my time already. To be more efficient, I strongly suggest brain dumping the idea as soon as the call comes out and refine only in the week leading up. This is probably a bit skewed since all the major deadlines were in this semester (think HUBBLE!) and the HST cycle was 1.5 years so I threw everything I had at it. Still. A lot of time...


This gives a good idea for the time individual projects took. Note HST clocking in at 136 hours... but given I put in 8...that is 17 hours per proposal. Most of them re-writes/polishes but it gives a good idea how much time it takes. Really a week for one. At least...
That 76 hour Keynote? A public talk I gave. The email is a low estimate since I count that as a "everything" entry but I do lots of reply/triage on the bus while not toggling that.

All in all ok but must have a critical look as to improve efficiency or just not do stuff since 60hr/week is too much. And inherently inefficient.

Monographs

I attended a workshop for young faculty (I'm young!...well for faculty...). It was about writing, something I feel I struggle with a lot. I do alright (pretty high output) but I then read something that JD Dalcanton or her many students has written and have to just admire the writing.

Much of writing is the editing of course. I am re-learning that as I am now editing down a MsC report into an A&A paper. It's tough and requires focus. Focus is where is all lies really. The ability to do deep work. And distractions aren't just the UPS flights that land practically on my head here. It's twitter, facebook, politics global and local etc. It all...distracts...

So I read the book by Scalzi on writing ("Your hate mail will be graded" etc) and I try this blog. Quick writing exercises.

Back to the workshop. These are very considerate in that these are organized. How do I write? Put all my effort in grant writing? Papers? And the question came up on the writing of a book (monograph) which is essentially a requirement for tenure in certain fields (not astronomy thankfully) and the advice was to get up at the crack of dawn (middle of the night really) and write 1-2 hours with a word count target. Edit later but hammer out that word count. Unfortunately the advice on prioritizing is...harder for a panel to give and thus we end up with Do All The Things once more...

It struck me also how it strange it is that a University requires such a Deep Work effort all the while not really providing the environment to hammer it out. Now I strongly suspect nothing but gibberish would appear if I start writing at 5am but I agreed with the carve-out-time-interval and dedicate it to writing and also that it should be every workday. And mornings should hopefully work best. But 5am? Really?

So here goes...blog/articles/grant prop...

PS: I am glad there is no need for another astronomy book. I would have serious issues getting up so early and write one...

First post as an Associate Professor

The blog has been quiet for a while. Why was that?...oh right. International move with kids, cold start to a 100-student physics class, the sudden urgent need to get grants, a parade of proposal deadlines...did I mention teaching and the move? 

Well the move is done. We are indeed here. Here being Louisville, Kentucky. It took a lot more work and lots of shenanigans before we actually in a house of sorts, going to work and school etc. Much has been done by Robin, especially on the school stuff. C is going through the hoops because her reading skills were off for first grade. Well. yeah. different language and schooling system. But she has been a trooper.

So I am now nearly done with my first semester. It has been okay. Many many balls to keep in the air and little time and margin to get it right. That has been very stressful. The constant feeling something would slip up and mess everything up.

Other than that. Hellooo professoring!