Hej från Sverige

Hello from Sweden! It's been a while since I've blogged, and I've done quite a bit in the interim, including finishing my first year at Green Mountain, buying a house, and flying to Stockholm to work for a month. Sadly, that means I haven't had any time to blog. I realize that may have caused some of you to question my priorities, but I have to do what I have to do.

The first year of teaching wrapped up pretty well. It was a lot of work. I had naively hoped that the final year of writing my dissertation would be the hardest I ever have to work again. Turns out I was wrong. But in spite of the workload of preparing six new classes, two with labs, I had a really good time. It only really dragged once the spring semester was finally over and I still had a grant to write and some research orders to make, which I didn't finish until a couple days before I left.

As for the house, it's ~150 year old house in the village, about a 5 minute walk from work. It's a pretty ideal location, and we got it for what I'd like to think was a decent price (and lower than just about anywhere we could have moved -- or at least would have wanted to.) The downside is it needs a fair bit of work, although most of it is cosmetic, and it's definitely livable. We were even able to accommodate for a weekend a couple weeks ago.

The previous owner really had a thing for flowery wallpaper, though, so we have our work cut out for us. The biggest project so far has been to replace the floor in the laundry room. I don't have much experience with construction but luckily it mostly required me to hone my destruction skills. I'm going to try not to turn this blog into "The Mark and Anne's remodel" blog, so I'll leave it at that for now, but you can anticipate some pictures in the future.

Last weekend, Anne and I headed down to New York to visit Larry and Camila. I was flying out of JFK, and it seemed like a perfect excuse to visit them, which we haven't done since we moved to the east coast. We had a great time. It was my first trip to New York and Anne's first since she was nine. I felt like we saw a lot even though we never left Manhattan. It was also cool to discover that, by driving to Albany and then taking the train, it's just about as far as Boston.

I arrived in Stockholm Tuesday afternoon, staying with Per and Martine (colleagues from Berkeley that I'll be working with while I'm here) last night. Yesterday I moved into the apartment I'm subletting for the month. It's a pretty ideal location, only a short walk from the city center and not too far from the University where I'll have an office. I'll have more to write once I settle in and start exploring a bit more. For now, I leave you with a photo from the terrace of my apartment. It's looking across the courtyard toward Sveavägen, a main north/south street in central Stockholm.