The last month, in addition to featuring Christmas, Hanukkah, other-holidays-some-of-which-might-include-a-flying-spaghetti-monster, and a whole new year, also featured a whole bunch of zooming around the country for me. Unlike Paul Simon, neither my first or final destination would I call my "natural coast" (see also this album). I, in fact, have no natural coast, and that point was destination #2.
First off was some time spent in Bostonia. Rather than trying to convey the slew of emotions that being back evoked, I will just say that it was really lovely to just be in the city again, and of course even lovelier to see so many wonderful familiar faces. There was a lot of walking around in the cold rain (even that part was kind of refreshing, honestly), many tasty meals shared with good folks, multi-night B11 live band karaoke madness, hot chocolate and bananagrams, A Christmas Carol AND the Nutcracker, an apple-fetching excursion, and some hair-slaying (I now have a bob).
And then it was time for my natural un-coast, or rather, the place where I'm from, Indiana. This trip definitively marked the longest period of time I'd spent at home since moving away nearly nine years ago -- I was back in Kokomo for nearly two and a half weeks. The trip feature some work (more than I had expected; less than I had hoped), some reading, a lot of hanging out with my sisters, some game-playing, some old-friend-seeing (including some folks I hadn't seen in many a moon), the viewing of a spectacular Indiana-grown independent film made by some friends called The Legend of Green Sock, a touch of karaoke on New Year's Eve, and a great deal of time spent in the presence of my cat. I was feeling a bit stir-crazy toward the end at times, but it was utterly relaxing and really nice.
Since being back in California, courses have resumed (best quote from a neuroscientist yet this year: "we may have some issues, but at least we're not out of jobs, like physicists"), labwork has resumed (including the fairly successful running of a participant in an EEG experiment), I have talked about twin studies to a class of would-be geneticists, and I have learned about a project in Senegal educating women about the dangers of not interacting (read: speaking) with their children at early stages, i.e., not taking advantage of all that young brain plasticity!
In other news: life continues on the other coast and a part of the other coast is coming to me in February! Hopefully before then some serious chunks of science will happen. More on that later...
