coming up this week

With his ever-increasing mobility, Spoons got back to work at his office on Thursday and Friday afternoons last week. The subway ride was a fair bit of work - balancing, sitting in not-so-comfortable seats, people jostling everywhere - but he made it. He said it was a good workout! Since a full day of sitting is still a lot, he'll probably go in for the afternoons again next week and work from home in the mornings. The predicted time off from work for this surgery is 4-6 weeks, so he's definitely doing well, with really only 1.5 weeks fully off, this week and next week working mostly from home and some shorter hours, and then probably back full time in the office around the 4 week mark.

We went also went to Manhattan yesterday to see the NY Philharmonic (see the program if you want to know more). I won the tickets last summer at a concert in Prospect Park in Brooklyn by signing up for the Philharmonic's mailings, and I had months and months of concerts to choose from. As we were sitting down last night in our very nice Philharmonic-provided seats, I noticed that a work colleague of mine and his wife had the seats next to ours! (He was even wearing an ATLAS neck tie!) They had also won the seats by filling out something for the Philharmonic - a pre-concert talk survey in their case. So we both had won some kind of drawing, we both picked the same concert, and then we got seated next to each other. So funny. The music was good and it's always fun to get out and do real New York things.

The week ahead for me is an exciting one - I'm interviewing for two jobs. One is a job at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, in Berkeley, California, to keep doing research like I am now and to help organize an important physics publication, and the other is a faculty position to be a Physics professor at NYU, where I would keep doing research but also other professor-y things like teaching. If I don't get these jobs this year, I have one more year to work at Columbia before my contract there is over and I have to find something else. This Monday and Tuesday I'll interview in California (I'm on my way there now!) and Thursday and Friday I'll interview at NYU. I am excited about both positions and San Francisco and New York are both places where we would like to live and where Spoons could keep working at Google. So, wish me luck! And don't worry - our NYC crew is taking good care of Spoons (as always :) ).