Home for the Holidays

I’m home for the holiday season! So far there has been a lot of visiting with family, home-cooked meals, and Christmas decorations.

Christmas in San Francisco

I tend to gravitate toward more open, natural spaces when I have a choice in travel, but there’s just something about Christmas in the city that can’t be beat. Almost any city will do, but San Francisco is high in the rankings of Christmas joy this time of year.

Tahoe weekend

Attending AGU is always a rewarding, yet grueling, experience. It’s a long week that takes strategic planning to keep from getting burned out. A few days of vacation afterward always helps to rejuvenate me before heading back to work the following week.

Last year I went back to Maryland after AGU. The year before that a friend and I stayed in a hostel and went on an epic biking misadventure in the bay area. Two years ago was my first visit to San Francisco so I spent some extra time taking in the sights. This year Brian and I were both in town so we decided on a weekend getaway to Tahoe.

100th post

This is my 100th post! In honor of the momentous occasion, I would like to confirm that I am, in fact, not yet dead. Far from it.

The Coffee Crusade

This week I’m at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting. The AGU Fall meeting happens every year at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, probably because it’s one of the only conference centers in the country with the capacity to house a conference so big. More than 25,000 people attend every year, primarily geoscientists, but also journalists, educators, and folks in related field of private industry.

Below is a small subset of the AGU population in part of the poster hall. The conference consists of a few football fields of posters, fresh daily, plus roughly 100 rooms where 10 to 60 minute talks are occurring basically nonstop between 8am and 6pm Monday through Friday. Posters and talks are an attraction at AGU, but networking with colleagues and collaborators is another great reason to go and often fills the in-between meals and breaks. It’s a busy week for sure.