Twenty months.

It's interesting to see what can happen in two years. Well, more like twenty months in my case. When I accepted the offer of my current job at the Joint Astronomy Centre (JAC) at the end of November 2012, this day, September 30, 2014, was as long as I was guaranteed employment due to the funding agencies in the UK and Canada ending their funding of the JAC to focus on other projects.

Thankfully, a lot can happen in twenty months. Funding from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) in the UK, the majority funding partner, has been extended through January, when the East Asian Observatory (EAO) is poised to take over management of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope from the JAC as the JAC officially ends as an organization after three decades of astronomy on Mauna Kea.

I know there's a lot of acronyms for terms that I haven't necessarily discussed much before in those two paragraphs, for which I apologize. I haven't talked about the transfer process much because for much of it there were a lot of unknowns, such as whether it was actually going to happen or not, which meant that it was sort of hush-hush. The good news is that it's now virtually certain that it will happen, and as a result, I continue to have a job with the JAC through at least the end of the year, as well as a job with the EAO when the JAC finally comes to an end.

So yeah. A lot can happen in twenty months. Thankfully, I still have a job that I enjoy, and a continuation of that job even as the telescope I work for changes hands. At the very least, it'll be interesting to see where the next twenty months takes me.