After MFF I flew back to the UK for the final two weeks of the work year, as usual. Sometimes people ask why I bother, and perhaps if I didn't have loads of January travel on the books each year I would consider just staying in the US through Christmas. Still, the last couple weeks of December in the UK are some of the nicest - everything is ( Read more... )

The last stop of my North America trip was Midwest Furfest in Chicago - one of those central social pillars of my year, even if managing to get a room there is getting harder and harder as the con becomes more popular. This year I was particularly confident about going, though - with the Mexico conference the previous week I knew I would be ( Read more... )

For some reason (hopefully a good reason?) this is a year in which I'm getting a lot of conference invites, often to interesting places: Bormio in February and Aspen in August (which I attended); Rome in July, South Africa in August, and Armenia in October (which I did not, due to scheduling conflicts and/or lack of time). The last invite of the ( Read more... )

Prior to this year, the last time I made the journey back to New Mexico for Thankgiving was in 2016, when I was still a postdoc in Denmark. While I'd visited every year before that, the tradition was put to an end when I moved to the UK by the extremely difficult first semester of teaching (that left no time at all for a mid-semester break). Even ( Read more... )

The busiest semester in years (probably since the first year after I started this job) is finally drawing towards an end - I taught my last class yesterday and all the coursework and exams are written: just a review session and some grading remains, and teaching will be over until next September. What a relief that will be - between that and my ( Read more... )

This entry unfortunately has to start with the obligatory remark on the miserable political news, which is that one of the worst human beings on the planet has somehow managed to again be elected to the most important job on the planet. The exact repercussions of this are unknowable but range from bad to really bad to catastrophic. Somehow even ( Read more... )

It's been a while, hasn't it? I can't recall the last time I took two months between entries - probably this is the longest gap since I started writing here 20 years ago. It's been something of a perfect storm, as these things go: being extremely busy, yet without anything extremely notable happening, and meanwhile something of a different ( Read more... )

I returned to the UK on Tuesday evening, and after a few days of trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to catch up at work it was once again the weekend. Specifically: my birthday weekend ( Read more... )

My original plan at the end of the Aspen workshop was simply to fly back home, but a look at the convention calendar presented another possibility: Denfur, the Colorado furry convention, was coincident with the end of my stay and only an hour's flight (or four hours' drive) away. Furthermore, in my discussions with Riff earlier in the summer it ( Read more... )

I'm wrapping up a three-week stay in Aspen, Colorado, for another summer workshop. This is my fourth time attending one of these events (previous visits were in 2019, 2015, and 2014) and without a doubt they are some of the most pleasant academic activities out there. For several weeks I'm able to gather with twenty or thirty other experts in ( Read more... )