The blog has been quiet lately, and I have to write a report on how I spent my sabbatical. So…

I’ve already covered January, February and March here, so I don’t have to go that far back. But April seems like a long time ago. It is interesting to try and look back 5-7 months and figure out what I was doing. Blogging turns out to have been useful for this but so were my electronic calendar, sent mail, and even my GitHub contributions, which I realize are looking quite pathetic lately.

What did I do in April? Well, I blogged a lot. I went to Python in Astronomy 2015, part of the reason for the lots-of-blogging. Since I was on the organzing committee there was some last-minute running about before the meeting, and also some work afterwards (like the talk slide and useful link repositories). But I also spent a lot of April finishing a Letter of Intent for a proposal to NSERC CREATE.

How about May? I ran a Software Carpentry workshop, organized the 87th meeting of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Scientific Advisory Council, went to part of the CASCA Board of Directors meeting, and walked 70 km on vacation. (I might leave that part out of my official report.)

June involved some more vacation, the Future and Science of Gemini meeting and associated user’s committee meeting meeting, a bunch of getting-ready-to-be-an-administrator meetings, another Software Carpentry workshop and quite a bit of meeting with my grad students as I prepared to work elsewhere for a big chunk of July. Sometime in June I learned that my CREATE letter of intent didn’t make the cut for submission of a full proposal. Bah.

During all of this time I was working on various papers with grad students, as discussed here; of these I am pleased to say that

  • paper #1 hasn’t gone anywhere (ok not so pleased about that)
  • paper #2 is published
  • paper #3 is submitted, got a referee’s report, and is nearly finished revisions
  • paper #4 will be submitted in the next few weeks
  • paper #5 was submitted last week

All in all not a bad 6 months. What do you think, should I just submit this blog post as my report, hyperlinks and all?