This is really an update post for anyone who is interested. It seems that I haven’t posted anything here for 4 years(!), and my last post was about Covid quarantine … Well, I thought it was time to try to revive it.
Anya and I are living in Boulder, which is a smallish town in Colorado, just north of Denver. We moved here from Germany for Anya’s work — she got a postdoc position at Colorado University. I came too, but my job didn’t — MPIA, where I worked before, doesn’t allow remote work and especially overseas. So, for our first six months here, I was a liberated man with more free time than usual.
Boulder is just on the border between the Rocky Mountains to the west and the Great Plains to the east. So it’s an unusual view when you’re landing at Denver airport: through one window, mountains, through the other, a flat brown grid of farmland as far as the eye can see. The Rockies are the mountain range that runs all the way from Mexico to Alaska, dividing the continent in half, and Colorado has the highest peaks of the range. The first row of mountains near Boulder are the Foothills, and you can see them from everywhere in town. Below is a view from the Physics building, which has some of the best views in town.
I do have a job now: I’ve just started work at the University of Oklahoma, about a month ago. The plan is to work remotely a big chunk of the time, spending maybe a week in every month on Oklahoma and the rest of the time with Anya in Colorado. This is our current solution to the “two body problem”. Astronomy departments are small and they’re spread pretty thinly around the world, so finding two within commuting distance that (a) suit our different research interests and (b) are recruiting at the same time isn’t easy. On top of that, lots of universities still don’t really accommodate remote work officially, even if in practise most people work from home half the time. Happily my boss (Mukremin Kilic) is very understanding and the department at OU does have a system for it, so fingers crossed this will work out well.
The group at OU has been very welcoming. As I mentioned I’m working with a prof named Mukremin Kilic, on the topic of white dwarf binaries. That’s the research that I did during my PhD, and still my favourite thing that I’ve worked on, so I’m happy to have it be my main focus again.
The university seems like a nice enough place to be. It’s modelled on the classic Cambridge/Oxford style university buildings, but obviously built much more recently. They even have some red phone boxes just to make me feel at home! The town is called Norman, a suburb of Oklahoma City. There’s not too much there beside the uni, but there are cafes and bars and it’s a pleasant neighbourhood to walk around. In the US it’s not guaranteed that you can walk at all, so I can’t complain.
Anyway, that’s life at the moment. We hope this will be our situation for a few years. After moving country twice in the last 18 months, we’re in need of some stability. Given the state of the world, stability isn’t the easiest thing to find, and the USA isn’t the best place to find it. But let’s hope it works out okay.