Yo, I went to Scandinavia (Norway though) a few months ago. Absolutely beautiful. Took about 100 pictures on a fjord tour, and that's like more pictures than I took over the two years before the trip. I really need to get around to writing up a trip report. I travel all the time for conferences, and I'll eventually be in Uppsala, we have some people on our project working at IRF.

But things have been good, especially lately. During most of July and some of August, I was down to like 20 hours a week of research. Now I'm back to around 60, which has been typical. I'm just glad to be done with classes so I can focus on my hyper-competitive research. Grad school's pretty brutal, but I've only got another year-ish. First thing on the to do list after I get a real salary is to buy an engagement ring for the girl I've been seeing for almost eight years. I'm not sure if I want to continue competing in research or if I'll go into a cozy industry job. It used to be that I couldn't comprehend why anyone wouldn't elect to stay in academia forever, but I've just about done a full pivot.

Anyway, cheers, welcome back!