A topsy-turvy week

It's been something of an up-and-down week this past seven days, or rather, down-and-up. Last Wednesday I learned that my paternal grandmother had suddenly passed away back in Nebraska, possibly due to a blood clot or stroke from a fall a few days earlier. She'd been in good health otherwise, having sent me a birthday card just last month (like every year), so it came out of the blue. I wouldn't say I got to know any of grandparents as well as I'd like to, due to living in either different states or different countries from all of them for practically my entire life, but having been born in Nebraska myself some of my earliest fragmentary memories are from visiting my grandparents' house way out in the country: the scent of baby's breath or dill growing in the gardens, the sound of driving down the long gravel road out of town, the feel of the wind over the Nebraskan prairie. (The same feeling is found thousands of feet up the sides of Maunakea where the wind blows over the same low grass and gently rolling slopes, bringing those memories back unexpectedly.)

There'll be a funeral in a few days which I'l be attending via Zoom—there's virtually no way I could get a travel exemption from the Australian border control (out and back in) on such short notice, and the cost of flights is prohibitive: the absolute lowest were still over $12,000 this close to the event. To be honest, the death of a relative has been something of a nightmare scenario for me ever since both my maternal grandparents came down with COVID-19 about a year ago (they both survived and are doing well, but it was a bit dicey for a while), since getting back to the US (or, more accurately, back into Australia) has been non-trivial since March last year. I guess I can stop worrying about it happening now that it's happened, at least, in the same way the mother of the boy playing ball indoors can stop worrying that her expensive vase might get broken.

To complete the emotional roller coaster this past week, I also received some very welcome news indeed: three weeks ago I had an interview for a position with Gemini Observatories, and yesterday I got (and accepted) a job offer! Gemini Observatories operates two identical telescopes in Hawaii and Chile, and, as the job was for software development and could be done from either location, I indicated my preference for Hilo during the interview and as a result will be heading back there in a very short time, nominally less than three months. I put nearly two months' effort into polishing my résumé and cover letter before applying, and the position sounds like I'm definitely going to enjoy it (as I've come to realize that I really love software development over the past few years), so I was ecstatic to have been selected. And, of course, there's the whole “getting to return to Hilo” bit as well, all the more alluring in the grip of a Melbournian winter. I'll be working on Gemini's Python package for reducing data from Gemini instruments, but I'll have more to say about it in the future as I figure out how that looks in practice.

These next few months are going to be rather busy it looks like: not that they weren't already, as I work furiously to finish up the two papers I'm working on and submit my thesis, but now I'll have moving preparations on top of that. Still, I now also have both some positive motivation and a lack of stress about what I was going to do after wrapping up my PhD, so hopefully I can really buckle down and get things done these next few weeks. That may or may not have an effect on my posting schedule here, but I'll try to keep things going at a low level, at least; there should be no lack of subjects as I prepare, only time! And that's been my roller coaster of a week: somber, a little sad, yet looking forward to the future with a renewed optimism. A hui hou!