TRAVELS WITH MATTIE

Well here we are, 2023. This year has brought amazing (and sometimes terrifying) changes, tons of travel, new laughing places, new job, new plans, lots of snow, and my favorite pair of fishing pants yet. So last I wrote, we'd bought a van. We love the van. God the van is awesome. More to come on that. But what has happened since? A LOT.  The biggest news: I resigned from my faculty job at UCSB in August 2022. It was just time for a change. After more than a decade spent teaching at the Bren School, I was becoming too curmudgeonly, too often. It just stopped feeling good. I think it was probably the combination of Covid + developing and kicking off the new Master's program that did me in, but I can't say for sure. I recently ran into a past student while hiking near North Lake. When I told him I'd quit, he said "That makes sense. You really gave it 150% all the time." I left knowing that I really had given that job everything I had. Maybe that's what cost m...

Friends and family,  Here we are three (!) years later, happily writing from somewhere magical on Sherwin Summit in the Eastern Sierra. While Greg, Teddy and I have been relatively lucky during the pandemic, the past few years have been a real struggle - one in the making since before Covid started, that has gone through big losses and weird changes, and that whirlpooled me right into a remote teaching tailspin that I never quite crawled out of. After not feeling like myself for the past several years, I've recently decided to make some big changes. I'll be sharing those here fully once things are finalized, but for now I'm excited thinking about how mixing things up will keep me more active, adventurous, and challenged by new stuff  - important things that had slipped away.   One piece of fun and admittedly ridiculous news is that we got a camper van in June! Here it is, looking happy and right at home somewhere far above Burcham Flat. After barely careful considera...