Three-Toed Sloth

Spring and All

Attention conservation notice: This is an unusually self-absorbed post, even for me.

Spring arrived very suddenly in Ann Arbor last week, in the form of actual warm weather. As Julie's mysterious co-blogger Mock Turtle said over dinner, within hours the mode of dress around campus went from Michelin-man down padding to Sin City. Other signs have followed: magnolia and forsythia and cherry in bloom, crocuses unfurling, the cat shedding all over the place and stalking birds in the early morning hours, the trees coming into bud, green creeping back in everywhere, boaters back on the river. It's all very wonderful and life-affirming, and like the previous two springs I've had here, makes you feel glad to live someplace nice. (I happen to think that where I live is an especially nice part of Ann Arbor, too.)

This is going to be my last spring in Ann Arbor. My post-doc here, as I've mentioned, finishes at the end of May, at which point I join the statistics department at Carnegie Mellon as a visiting assistant professor. (If you want to draw conclusions about the power of blogs, achieving success through social capital, etc., well, it's a free country.) It's a three-year, non-tenure-track position, with teaching duties of one course a semester. I realize it's conventional to say you're excited about new jobs, especially when your new employers can overhear, but I am excited: the people in the department are great and do very cool stuff, I'm looking forward to teaching again, it'll be good to live in a city rather than a small town again, and Pittsburgh actually seems like a decent one. I'm even kind of looking forward to house-hunting, which should be helped a lot by things like this amazing hack of Craig's List and Google Maps. (That last was kindly supplied by John Taylor.) As a former devoted reader of Invisible Adjunct, I realize just how lucky I am.

So: I'm looking forward to the new job, and at some point I will no doubt post some feeble confabulation about how this isn't really a deflection in my career path, but rather part of a Cunning Plan to put the stat. back in stat. phys. But today I'm going to enjoy spring here.

Self-Centered