Hey, Bales: San Diego February

Even though we moved, I'm still finishing up my degree in San Diego, so I have to go down about once a month to meet with my advisor and my research team. This is both great and hard at the same time because although I love visiting our friends in SD, I miss Nathan a lot. Between my San Diego trips and my conference trips I sometimes am gone for half the month or more. We have lived long distance quite a bit through our marriage (San Diego-Sunnyvale, Seattle-Sunnyvale, Seattle-San Diego, San Diego-Cambridge, UK), but somehow it is even worse to go back and forth between being close and far apart.

Oh palm trees and ocean! I miss you!
Please jump in my carry-on!
...Oh wait... do you count as a liquid?!? Drat!

I try to make my San Diego visits as fruitful as possible. This time I was able to give a practice talk, attend some group meetings, meet with my advisor, and have some fantastic paper visioning/outlining meetings with my officemate Laura. I also try to intentionally spend time with some of our closest friends in SD, which meant a mini road trip/sister reunion in mammoth (we'll get you next time Roshni and Laura!), a super fun movie sleep over/beach breakfast with our old roommate the night before my flight, an ammeture recording session with our CSE friends (I'll post when we finish, it's pretty rad), and my first ever country line dancing at In Cahoots with our friend Jennifer from GCF. Oh! I also watched the Bachelor for the first time and I think it seems an eery paralel to finding an academic job... you put yourself out there, try to look appealing but not desperate, you don't really know what the other person is looking for, and you progress or get eliminated in a relatively opaque fashion.

About to go down an unsettlingly steep part
of the mountain... or at least Sarah and I though so?
Everyone else was going rather fast
and looked pretty comfortable. :-\