How to talk about travel and work in 2020. There’s the usual thoughts about the meetings that didn’t happen, travel that could have been, and friends that we haven’t seen. This isn’t so much a rehash of the year as it is a retrospective on things how things started and how things are going.
Overall, it’s been a general year of hunkering down. So let’s rewind back a bit further into 2019 and see where things stood heading into the pandemic year(s?).
Just about the time of my last blog post (All the way down into a black hole), I’d gotten empaneled on a jury for a triple-homicide murder trial. My very first jury duty and yes, that was a doozy. I don’t think it was until the Fall that I really understood the lasting mental health impact of that experience. I’m not sure I’m still in a good headspace to look back and write about it, so we’ll leave it there.
Simultaneously (yes, really), I stepped into a much larger role as the Project Scientist for a Small Explorere proposal to NASA (these are the projects that are about the same size as NuSTAR). This gets a coin flip on the “most stressful things I’ve ever done” and “the thing that I’ve learned the most about how missions work”. Ultimately the mission was not selected (otherwise I’d writing a lot more about that project), but this still consumed pretty much every available moment from September 2018 through the day we hit submit on the proposal in August 2019 (with flashes of additional work in October of 2019 and April of this year as we dealt with the NASA feedback from the proposal).
Over the summer of 2019, this led to me driving to JPL (for those not familiar with the LA geography, JPL is located about as far as one can be from where I live without actually traveling outside of LA) nearly every day and trying to get there routinely for 8 AM meetings and sticking around until around 5 pm. Which means hitting the worst teeth of LA traffic, both ways. Fortunately, my wife is amazing and over the summer we agree that an upgrade in the automotive department was required to make this livable. Enter my Tesla Model3, which was a life saver both from the standpoint of auto-drive taking a significant amount of stress out of sitting in stop-and-go traffic for hours at a time and the handy carpool stickers that meant reducing (at least in the mornings) a 2.5 hour commute down to 1.5 hours.
Somewhere in between the craziness of the SMEX proposal we also wrote the NuSTAR Senior Review proposal in the early part of 2019. This is the proposal to NASA to continue funding the mission for another 3 years. That came together pretty nicely and NASA did recommend continued operations for NuSTAR through at least 2022 (which, when writing this in 2021, doesn’t seem that far away before we have to start working on the next one).
The Fall of 2019 was a period of recharging for 2020. There was an amazing trip to Hawai’i with friends in August (that’s a whole separate story with amazing memories), returning back to my “usual” working-from-home a few days a week scenario, and looking back to 2018 to figure out what science I’d been trying to get done pre-SMEX. I had a relatively large data analysis project accepted by NASA (the first paper from this project is close to being accepted now, so there will be more on that later), so there was a chunk of planning and analysis work getting that project going. It’s turned out to be more fruitful than I think I expected, which is also quite fun.
2020 was shaping up to be quite the travel year. In December, M and I had the travel for the year fairly well plotted out. I’d decided not to go to the AAS meeting in Hawai’i, since I was planning on doing a full Virginia swing in April for three back-to-back-to-back science meetings (and a friend’s birthday…and some disc golf tourism). I was going to fly back specifically to see Hamilton, which I’d gotten M for an early birthday present. June was travel to Italy for the NuSTAR 2020 Meeting, followed potentially by a trip to the SPIE Meeting in Japan later that month. Our 10th wedding Anniversary was happening during the Italy meeting, so we had planned out a week-long trip in July instead. Then August was trip to Lake Tahoe and then the COSPAR Meeting in Sydney (sadly, there was no cricket going on at the time). It was going to be quite the year.
Instead, 2020 was the year that we started up the NuSTAR science writing again (another reason I’ve been writing here less), highlighting a lot of the awesome papers that have been coming out this year. I’d already been prepared for working from home, but we (more or less) seamlessly transitioned to having three offices in our house all running Zoom/Teams/FaceTime simultaneously.
Of the positives for the year, I’ve learned how to make ice cream (maybe in detriment to any kind of diet we’d been on), re-started the home brewing hobby (ditto), played more disc golf than I have in my life (I’m averaging under par at our local course now, which was a 2020 NYE resolution), gotten to be more involved in my son’s daily life than I had been since he was born, attempted to crawl out of my skin only half a dozen times due to cabin fever, figured out the fun of playing board games on Steam / Zoom, perfected my reverse-sear steak (and learned that both M and O are both steak snobs now), installed irrigation for our citrus trees up front, help M design, build, and fill our raised bed garden in the back yard (and figured out that we all really do enjoy eggplant…which is good, because we had bucketfuls)…the list goes on and on. As do we all.
Goals for 2021 are hard to figure out. As I’m writing this, my city is in arguably the worst state that it’s been in since the pandemic started (not to mention the state of the country on Jan 14, 2021…). It’s unlikely that O will be back at in person school for the rest of 2nd grade, and since both M and I can work remotely we expect to be near the bottom of any vaccination list. In contrast to 2020, our travel calendar for the year is completely empty, but we hope that we’ll be able to see family (and my new niece) sometime this Fall or next Winter. Writing here more often is a start. Doing more science writing is another. And just in general trying to live our life as best we can.