What, I live in New Mexico now?
Yep, that’s right. I’m in New Mexico. Albuquerque, New Mexico, to be specific.
Life has been quite busy since my last (real) post exactly one month ago today. After taking a slight recovery from my thesis defense, my schedule picked back up with the end of my semester of teaching and final edits to the thesis. Oh, and moving out of my office. Turns out that was a mess.
Had a nice Christmas vacation with the family. I ended up spending a surprising amount of time working, spending one full day grading reports and two full days finishing my thesis. Luckily, everything got finished and I had a few days to relax and enjoy the family.
Christmas photos -> http://picasaweb.google.com/saroberts/20091225ChristmasVacation#
I arrived back in Minnesota on Dec 28th, just one day before the movers came to pack up my stuff. Turns out that I had a lot of work to do before the movers got there, while the movers were there, and much cleaning to do after the movers left. But buy the end of the 30th, my apartment transformed from the messy-lived-in state to the crowded-with-boxes state to the dirtily-empty state and finally to the clean-and-checked-out state. Christine was instrumental to helping me clean my apartment in time and thanks to her I’m getting my entire deposit back!
Pictures from the move to ABQ -> http://picasaweb.google.com/saroberts/20091230MovingToAlbuquerque#
Christine and I hopped in the car early on New Years’ Eve to start our drive to Albuquerque. We were originally planning on driving through South Dakota and Colorado, but some snow forecasts changed our plans. So we headed down through Iowa, stopping to see Donnie before spending the night with my parents in Arma. New Years’ Day saw us driving through Oklahoma City headed towards Amarillo, TX. We stopped in OKC to see the memorial for the federal building bombing and ended our day of driving with some tasty steak in TX. For out last day of driving, we make an early morning stop at the Cadillac Ranch before arriving in Albuquerque to get our house.
Speaking of our house, it’s shaping up quite nicely. Chris and I spent the first few days busily cleaning and painting on the walls in our dining area. Unfortunately, my stuff didn’t arrive until the 7th, so we definitely had some time to scope out some parts of Albuquerque, too, such as a Nuclear Museum, Natural History Museum, and Avatar in 3D XD. After my stuff got here, we got back to work, busily unpacking, washing, and putting stuff away. And I’m not even 1/2 way done. I still have an entire room full of boxes and a few nearly empty rooms, but I’m planning on hitting that hard this weekend. And hopefully I’ll get a bike ride in, too : )
Remember, pictures here -> http://picasaweb.google.com/saroberts/20091230MovingToAlbuquerque#
This week, I started my postdoc at Sandia National Laboratories. Monday, as I knew, was an all day training session with HR. The morning was exactly what I expected (safety, benefits, and security presentations), but the afternoon was amazingly dull. However, I survived.
Tuesday was my first real day at work. I had already picked up my badge and was able to get into my new office in time to meet with my manager. After picking up some office supplies, I met with my two co-mentors and started to learn about a couple of the projects I’m going to be working on. My time is going to be split in half between two concurrent projects, with one winding down after a month and another one picking up afterwards. Got to eat lunch with my mentors and Kris, and the started in on my training regimen.
So, a bit of good and bad news. The good news is that my DOE security clearance came in, so I’ll be able to get in to the Limited Area soon, which is where my group is located. The bad news is that I missed my clearance briefing (which I need before I can get my cleared badge) because I didn’t get the email in time, so I have to wait two more weeks before I can pick that up. So for now, I’m in a temporary office outside of the Limited Area, but it’s looking as if I will get to move in with my group soon after I get my badge, which will help out my work a lot!
Wednesday actually felt like a day of work to me. I got in at my scheduled time (7:30AM) and started doing more training courses (6 hours in total). I got to meet with Rekha for a while to learn a bit more about one of my projects, and then headed back to work for training. The first week of any job is full of this kind of stuff, unfortunately, but things seem to be coming around. I now have a dedicated linux workstation (8 cores!) that is a blade in a server room, and my client computer should be arriving soon. My laptop is all set up and tomorrow I’m going to try to figure out how to run some of the codes that I’ll be using. Hopefully I’ll get a sweet monitor and the rest of my computer stuff in soon to make life a bit easier.
So far, work is great. I really like the people who I’m going to be working with, and I’m more and more impressed ever day at the capabilities and resources that will be available to me. I’m excited to finish up all of the training, get my badge, and then get to work for real! Albuquerque is great, too. I’m enjoying my house and the neighborhood and am excited to keep exploring.
I’m hoping to post more regularly here, if nothing else than to keep in touch with everybody that I’ve left in Minnesota and elsewhere. I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to talk about my work, but I’ll try to keep everybody posted about my explorations of New Mexico. Until then …
Originally published at http://saroberts.com. Please leave any comments there.