Summer Break 2023 Reflections

Today marks the end of my summer holidays (for the most part). For better or worse, I crammed a lot of annual leave into the end of July and August. This included two weekend trips (one to boulder in Fontainbleau, another to hike Scafell Pike in the Lake District) and one very big road trip along the North American East Coast. It was a lot of camping, driving, and realizing I need to carry a kit with me to make nice coffee when traveling.

I really enjoyed being back in both the US and Canada, it felt so familiar and easy to drive down highways for miles with unending forest on either sides. I also did not realize how much I missed my close friends until I saw them in person. Even just being able to text people when you’re sort of at the same point in the day felt nice.

Just like the past few years, I’ve also de-social-media-ed my phone for August with the exception of tinkering with the new BlueSky community I set up at the start of the month. Every year I write that I am going to keep this up, but every year I always end up wanting to see what my friends are up to and re-install them over time. In an ideal world, everyone would just do an early 2000s blog like this so I can see what people are doing, but I know that’s not about to happen anytime soon.

I spent a lot of time this break also reflecting on my new mantra of:

finish what you started, only say yes to things you would happily cancel everything you have today to start tomorrow

which in practice on holiday means that I finally finished the following books:

• The Three Body Problem (I know I’m late to the party, but what a fantastic book, already picked up a copy of The Dark Forest in Portland, Maine)
• Kitchen Confidential
• Ritz and Escoffier (a very ‘on-holiday’ audio book that Evelyn and I made our way through driving after not knowing who Escoffier, inspired by Bourdain’s many references to him)
• Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia (so close to finishing this, should have it done by the time I’m back to Amsterdam)

Not going to lie, it felt great to finish these, knowing I have really strengthened my NOT starting anything new muscle the past few months. I am hoping to keep this train running on my flight to Japan for ICMPC and have a parallel experience with two manuscripts, but I have already fallen asleep twice on the plane just collecting all my notes to myself the past few weeks. There’s always the flight back.

Looking at my inbox, it looks like there’s a lot of things to look forward to on the horizon post-ICMPC.

Fingers crossed that a paper from my part-time post doc should be accepted soon. I’ll be giving a talk at Cambridge this autumn. I’ve got a lot of ideas for research (even pre-ICMPC!) and ways to hopefully keep working on the work-life balance practices I am always droning on about. What I really hope is that I’ll be able to announce a lot of pre-prints soon as well, as I am now also beyond the half-way point of this post-doc and need to start thinking about what’s next.

Though I probably could have pushed through those papers nearer the end of summer, it would have been at the price of not being able see all these great places, eat all this great food, and spend time with so many nice people.

I am sure I will just repeat all these sentiments post Japan.

Food

Friends

France

England

North America