In the middle of my training . . .

Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville. Oh my goodness, but my choice to do this train trip around the country has been so incredibly rewarding!

First of all, there's the train. The scenery has been breathtaking and mesmerizing. The windows of the train are much larger than those of airplanes, and west of Chicago the trains are double deckers, so, from my seat up high, I can see so much of the surrounding areas. Each train has had an observation club car, with open seating and tables, and with giant windows all around. In the club cars, people play cards, chat with one another, and take pictures and videos of the world outside. Because there's a club car where people can go to make noise, the regular train cars are pretty quiet. On my most recent trip, there was a pair of Amish women speaking Pennsylvania Dutch (Montana Dutch?) in the seats ahead of me, a family with an absolutely enchanted seven-year-old, a young couple a few rows back who cuddled and giggled over videos on their phone, another guy across the aisle who spent pretty much the entire trip reading his Bible.  Some of the trains have been pretty full up; the last one had lots of empty seats.

Scenes from my windows

On my trip from San Francisco to Seattle, I woke up in southern Oregon to see snow-covered pine trees out my window, and that particular view in many variations lasted for hours and hours.  Gorges with snow-covered pine trees; mountains with snow-covered pines; forests of snow-covered pine trees; towns nestled among snow-covered pine trees; rivers winding through snow-covered pine trees.  And then we tunneled our way through the mountains into Washington state, where all of a sudden there was green grass among the bare trees.  When I left Seattle, we tunneled our way back into snow again, and my entire trip through Montana ad much of North Dakota was so snowy that sometimes the windows seemed just like a white window onto fog. I arrived (three hours behind schedule) into Minneapolis, with temperatures hovering in the single digits either side of zero, and glad to have made it this far: the same train would be canceled for the next three days because of the snow and cold sweeping the area.

So much snow, some of it came in the train on the ground floor (not near my seats)!

Even better has been meeting up with all sorts of fun people.  In San Francisco, I got to catch up with many mathy friends from grad school or from past collaborations.  My husband is amazing at reaching out and keeping in touch with people, but that's not part of my own hard drive's operating system, so for me to do the same is a lot of work.  But bumping into friends at the meetings is so good for the psyche and the soul!  After the meetings were over, I invited myself over to the home of one of my favorite authors (he wrote his PhD as a comic--how cool is *that*!?), who was kind enough to let me impose on him.  We went hiking with his kids and dog, and we talked about ways to incorporate comics into explanations of mathematics.  Of course, this has me bursting with ideas.  

Friends old and new!  So many smiles.

Then in Seattle, where once again I'd just invited myself into other people's spaces, the mathematician I'd asked to meet up with invited a couple of others to join us (including one guy who I think of as a total Rock Star in this field), and they got excited enough about the stuff I'd been doing based on their work that she said, "Let's write a paper together!".  She opened up a shared Overleaf document and picked a very high-visibility journal as our target, and -- just like that -- I have a cool new group of collaborators.  Whoop!

Me with a statue of the UW Husky:
a very well-behaved animal.

By the time I got to Minnesota, where I'll be spending a bunch of days, it was lovely to get a ride from the train station from my stepdaughter's husband, and after he took me out to lunch with his friends I hunkered, spending the entire day trying to draw a diagram and bombing at it.  As is often the case, though, just as I was getting ready to drift off to sleep I figured out the construction technique, and my second day in the snowy tundra led to this awesome diagram.  

Something something something cool about homologies and intersections of conics.

The underlying construction lines are . . . convoluted.
Thank goodness I can hide them in GeoGebra if I don't want to see them!

So I've had beautiful travels, and amazing gatherings with acquaintances old and new, and also some really productive math time.  Like, seriously: how could life get better than this?

Gosling tells us her dog is undergoing acupuncture;
I think he looks like a cuddly porcupine.

Coming up next, I'll have a bit more downtime in Minnesota to catch up on writing up some geometry stuff.  I'll get to meet up with Nelson (who tells me he's in a new apartment with T) and with Sizzling, and I'll also spend time at the home of another mathematician and his family.  From there, Nelson and I will eventually bop over to Chicago, and from there, I'll head solo to Virginia to see more family, more mathematicians, some very dear friends (hi, Terry! hi, Stanley!), and even an artist I've wanted to meet.  

And that's the news from my little vertex of our family, as I continue to be wealthy in my adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.