A little update!

So, my bad for not posting for a few months!! Things got pretty crazy (crazy fun!) in Chile the last, oh, 6 months! I finished out my 10 month Fulbright grant in June and have been back in the States since. Ended up doing some great research in Chile, modeling planetary nebulae and attempting to quantify light pollution in northern Chile. I got to use data from the biggest optical telescope in the world (!) and had a chance to observe 4 nights for a really cool project to calibrate microwave background radiation data! Also met a ton of great people down there & it was very sad to leave so many friends behind. For now, we're doing a pretty good job staying in touch, and hopefully that will continue. I definitely want to go back ASAP to visit my friends and finish up some work that needs tidying up.

Right now I'm in Pittsburgh, about a month into my grad program in Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. It is going well so far. I have a very nice apartment about 2 miles from campus (and better yet, about 100 feet from the bus stop!). The work has been demanding, but not overly-hard thus far. Have also met some cool students in the department, and we go out and blow off some steam every now and then (a necessary activity to maintain sanity!).

In the next few posts, I'll try to summarize the rest of my time in Chile (plus side trips to Brazil and Peru). Unfortunately, my camera died in March, and I have very few pictures of my last 3 months. But fortunately, Canon fixed it for free when I got back to the US!! I'll leave you with a few pictures from this weekend's activities (which entailed celebrating the completion of our first grad school exam!).


Gary and I are the two Californians in the department. We're dreading the winter, and are both seriously concerned about our survival of the snowy months.



For some horrible reason, we decided to torture all bar-goers by singing karaoke on Friday night.



And of course, there's always time for some beer-brewing!!!