It's been a long time since I posted here, and I let the SSL certificate lapse, there were several inactive plug ins and themes, and I was running an outdated PHP, so instead of revising the current manuscript I am working on or editing articles for one of the journals I put together, I spent the morning engaged in blog hygeine. I am a discount blogger which means I end up doing everything myself, so it's time consuming.
The last time I updated the PHP, things got weird looking, so we shall see. The other problem with the DIY approach is: I don't know wtf I am doing.
The above, if all went well, is the beautiful, peaceful river in San Ignacio, BCS. I recently discovered 1,400 photos I had taken in May 2017 when I went down to Baja for field work for the PhD. I thought I had lost those pics forever, so it was really cool relocating them (on an 8 GB SD card that was in an old camera).
I want to get back into regularly posting here for a wide variety of reasons. I think I have extra domain names I can set up via my hosting service, as well, so will probably spend some time putting together one of those "research blogs" that scientists do these days. The postdoc funding runs out at the end of June and I have nothing solid lined up after that, so it's time to work on my presentation I guess. Editing ye olde LinkedIn profile and all that.
Seems like all of my behind-the-scenes shenanigans didn't muck things up, just judging from the preview of this post. The above image is Cerro Colorado, just outside San Ignacio, BCS, an epicenter of succulent diversity on Baja.
Mostly, things have been swampy feeling and ill-formed, and sort of dreamlike and unreal. I would be hard pressed to put any kind of narrative together of the past year or so, since it just seems like disconnected dream images. This is partly due to depression, partly due to the nature of research and writing, and partly due to being in a state of transition this whole time. A postdoc is necessarily temporary, and this one was originally only one year. It has been half time for the past year, in theory. It's at least 80 hours a week of mental space.
Lots of music rustlings have occurred over the past year as well, including two nights of concerts in Santa Fe, finding a ton of old live performances, getting a DAT tape of piano solo recordings transferred to wav files, etc. I am now thinking of setting up some kind of cloud archive for a lot of that music history. Maybe Bandcamp.
The PhD process was all-consuming, and eclipsed much of my life, and was immediately followed by the pandemic, and then two years teaching high school, and then this postdoc. So it seems like I am emerging somewhat from a haze, and I'm thinking maybe writing here will help crystallize some things. Dunno.
Connected to this desire for some kind of narrative is the fact that I am moving yet again, and, while I am looking forward to living with the partner and child, it's part of a long line of fundamental changes that have just kept rolling in. Since I started the PhD in 2014, almost ten years ago, I have moved nine times. This will be number ten. And the lease is for a year, and I am already thinking about angling for a better place for us after that year is up. Moving into this particular house (where M and M already live) was more a matter of plain practicality than anything. It's not a bad place by any means, but it's small and I'm not a huge fan of the north Phoenix neighborhood. There's a really nice patio and yard. After the brutal summer is over, I'm looking forward to that. Of course, very soon after I move, I have a conference in Michigan and summer travels, so everything is always moving.
Sometimes I feel like this feral cat who I fed and hung out with for a while back in 2012, in Tempe.