Just came back from probably our last skiing trip this season. That is, skiing with the group of friends I hang with at a regularly basis. I have one more trip planned in two weeks from now, when I will ski with a colleague-friend in Vail in Colorado. This is prior to a conference I am attending - one of the nicer parts of being in science. On this weekend we were with nineteen people and we stayed over in a really nice house we discovered on an earlier trip.

It comes complete with a pool table and hot tub, plus plenty of space and a lake side view. To organize a trip for nineteen people can be a little tricky here and there. It seems typical Cambridge mentality to definitely say YES on all invitations you get - until something better comes along, that is. The head count for this trip varied between twenty three and seventeen people joining. Since most houses require full payments prior to your stay and transportation also needs to be arranged, this can be a little frustrating here and there. I also do not seem to learn from prior trips, where more or less the same thing happened.
Having said that, these trips with about fifteen to twenty people joining are generally phenomenal. As was this weekend. We party and dance until late at night, only to get up again early in the morning for a day at the slopes. This weekend we counted people from ten different counties, from five different continents. Represented were Europe (France, Germany, Austria, Spain, the Netherlands, Ukraine), South America (Argentina), Asia (Iran), North America (Mexico), and Africa (Morocco). And yes, there was no native American on the trip - something we will have to work on in the future.

The last weeks have been busy but in a good way. My new car has been tested on two trips, on to New York and one to Sunday River (the ski area for which I have a season pass). It is still awesome. In between those activities there were several things at work that required a lot of attention. Despite all the economical turmoil the funding for my main project has been increased and we now have to apply for that money.

This is an open process and since we talk about lots of money many institutes around the country will compete with us. This means we have been working frantically to get all the preliminary data, all the right figures, etcetera. On top of that, I received a phone call from my boss last week if I wanted to the Cancer Meeting talk this week. Now, this meeting is a BIG meeting where every postdoc typically presents once during his postdoc period. I accepted, and as soon as the announcement was made many colleagues approached me to tell me that they saw that I was presenting (increasing my stress about this talk about tenfold). On Tuesday morning I did it, and it went pretty good. I presented the stuff that we describe in the manuscript that we have recently submitted (which is now finally being reviewed, by the way). Impressive to be there, but at the same time quite exciting that I have finally done that talk myself.
So I am looking at another weekend of working which is fine. Sometimes the tide is low and sometimes the tide is high. It won’t stop me from going out tonight and tomorrow