I've been away for the past while, busy with research and personal/relationship growth. Some of the latter is going to take me years to get to where I want to be, but at least I know where I'm going, even if I'm not entirely sure how to get there yet. I finished a paper on my research, then cut it from 32 pages to 15 in half an hour to meet the conference page limit. I don't expect that paper to get accepted, but hopefully the reviewers will have some advice at least. I'm in an awkward spot where I'm not sure how to cut this into several papers, but a proper writeup with all the details and good examples needs about 40 pages. Maybe that's something worth publishing on the Arxiv as a supplement to a mch much shorter conference or journal paper. It's been pretty cold out lately; the chickens are not a huge fan of this but they seem to be doing alright. At night they fluff all their feathers out so they look like little potatoes with beaks!