Busy, busy, busy

I’m now about one-third of the way through my second year as a junior faculty member. It’s been fantastic so far, I do enjoy it, but I feel like I can barely come up for a breath sometimes. This job is exciting and challenging, but also frantic and oh-so-close-to overwhelming sometimes. The commonly used metaphor about juggling and having too many balls in the air is so true. It’s impossible to keep them all in the air, but so far I haven’t dropped any really important ones. I think.

The consequence of all the excitement and challenge of getting a research program up and running and getting new courses developed has resulted in very little activity on this blog. There are fleeting moments where I think I’ll write a post about something interesting in the geoscience world — but then I quickly get funneled back into working on something else.

However, there are some items of note. I’ve got some graduate students now and they are settling in nicely. We’ve started a ‘paper in the pub’ series where we get together at a local watering hole and discuss a paper chosen by one of us. It’s fun to talk science outside the confines of the department and to get to know each other as well. I started this website for our research group, which has information about projects, links to papers, and some updates about activities from time to time as well.

I’m in the process of setting up a grain-size measurement lab. The instrumentation is in place and we’ll be getting it ready to make measurements in the next month. I’ll be using the lab to do grain-size analysis of the deep-sea sediment cores acquired this past summer on IODP Expedition 342. By the way, the preliminary report for the expedition has been published and is accessible here. It’s chock full of information about our preliminary findings of the drilling expedition.

I’m teaching introductory sedimentary geology (known as sed-strat) for our undergraduate majors again this fall. It’s a great group of students. I’ll be teaching a seismic stratigraphy course next semester, the content for which I’m working on now.

So, lots of stuff going on! I’ll try to get back to some more regular and substantive posting.