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... )

After my visit to the Lake District last weekend I headed directly to London and flew out on Tuesday - first to Denver, where I picked up a connecting flight to Albuquerque for my usual New Mexico summer trip ( Read more... )

My return to Liverpool did not last for long: I returned home on Sunday night, and was off again Friday morning. Most of this time was devoted to work catch-up: meeting PhD students, meeting master's students, reading paper drafts neglected over the preceding weeks of travel, and closing out the official results from resit assignments given out ( Read more... )

The scheduling of my trip to California provided an opportunity: I'd be flying into London the day before the London Furs' big summer weekend party, which consists of a four-hour ride on a "party boat" up and down the Thames river, followed by an extra long furmeet at their usual pub venue. I attended regularly during the first few years after I ( Read more... )

After my short Bay Area vacation over the Fourth of July weekend it was time to shift the trip back into work mode - the rest of the trip would be devoted to a stay in Southern California. Largely this would be to devoted to a research group visit to Caltech (something of an annual tradition of mine), but the first item on the itinerary was a task ( Read more... )

The flight to the US was long and mostly spent working through a backlog of e-mails over the satellite wi-fi, but I touched down in San Francisco mid-afternoon on the Fourth of July (a little ahead of schedule) and was quickly collected by my hosts Mynx and Hours to be shuttled over to a nearby furry house party to initiate what was now in effect a ( Read more... )

It's been a while since the last one of these ( Read more... )

After being back in the UK for one week it's already time to leave again - this is a summer of nearly maximal travel, and from May through to the end of August my time at home will be a tiny fraction of the time away from home. In fact, the 8-day span that's just ending now will be my longest span at home of those four months ( Read more... )

I am way behind in updating: the past few weeks have been a chain of essentially nonstop travel from place to place to place to place, and with talks and presentations to give and an assortment of imminent deadlines throughout (plus social activities occupying what few evenings I did have available) it's taken until the end of this trip to given ( Read more... )

Following the trip to West Virginia last week I landed at Heathrow around 8am on Friday morning and made my way on the Underground towards central London. Originally my thinking had been to simply catch the train directly to Birmingham, but I knew that Lupestripe would be planning a beer-tasting party during the con and the store that sells beer ( Read more... )