The back in my office post

So, finally after many weeks I'm back in my office in Columbus. I've got a new house (which is very nice), a job interview in London (which is also very nice), a new fitness centre (ditto) and some new house mates (which is odd, but so far very nice also).

I think I really fell on my feet with the house, it was great that I arrived at 10 pm on Thursday night and had somewhere to go. In fact by midnight all my stuff was moved in, thanks to a pickup truck, a minivan and a rental car. It wasn't all unpacked, but it was all in the house. I'll have to post a few photos of the place when I have a chance to take them. We even have a swing seat on the front porch. All we need is a rocking chair and the place will be perfect.

Before I talk about our drive home across America, I just want to mention that fun we had last Monday (the day of ANITA's engineering flight). The day started with me staying up all night and getting very confused when people who went to bed kept saying yesterday and I wasn't sure if they meant Saturday or Sunday and ended with a couple of whisky bottles being passed around the picnic tables at the Billy the Kid (the bottles were being passed around so vigorously that Kim, who drove back with me, didn't manage to make it in to work until after five the next afternoon). Whilst the whisky passing was fun, the highlight of the day had to be getting lost on dirt roads in New Mexico while looking for the landing site (dirt roads in which our PI — principal investigator, i.e. big boss man — managed to get his car stuck in the mud, requiring the rest of us to push him out) and doing shots of tequila (with 8 of my fellow collaborators, including the PI), salt and lime included, using the boot of the car as a bar. After the shots we all decided it would be a good idea to climb a nearby rocky outcrop to try and see the payload, we couldn't but had fun scrambling over and under barbed wire fences.

Now I think I might go to the shiny new gym and work off some of the quesadillas and buritos I ate in New Mexico.