Talus and Heavner Blog

Carrie found the BMX track on North Mesa by the horse stables (literally, a nice short walk from the new house). Torsten approves.

From BMX Spring 2010

From BMX Spring 2010

From BMX Spring 2010

From BMX Spring 2010

From BMX Spring 2010

Check the whole album if you’d like..

No, not alcoholism, not even too much “screen time”.. Torsten is already picking up his dad’s Su Doku addiction…

From BMX Spring 2010

Here are a few photos from the deck of our new house, for those of you wondering what to look forward to when you visit…

In the midst of the chaos of moving, unpacking, throwing out backs, family visits, snow storms, etc.. Torsten got to smash open his first geode. Awesome!

From TorstenRocksAvenEats

From TorstenRocksAvenEats

From TorstenRocksAvenEats

We are overdue on the blog with all the changes, but first some kid updates for grandparents and fans.

Aven ate her first solid food (well, rice “cereal”/paste). She didn’t eat a whole lot, but she liked it!

From TorstenRocksAvenEats

From TorstenRocksAvenEats

From TorstenRocksAvenEats

Torsten says “AWESOME AVEN!”

From TorstenRocksAvenEats

Behind The Weather: Strongest El Nino In A Decade This is good news for Los Alamos, bad news from Juneau. Five degrees (F) makes all the difference..

From Weather

It was a great whirlwind weekend. On Saturday, we hung out with Jonathan (Torsten’s new neighborhood friend) all day, and we went down to Santa Fe at the Santa Fe Children’s Museum–unfortunately, no pictures of Jonathan made it out. I only had my cell/camera, and even then, most of the pictures were corrupted on import. UG, but I guess we’ll just have to go again! The boys had a great time. Only this one picture of Torsten in the mirrored tunnel survived:

From Santa Fe Children's Museum

we finally dug out the ski boot box. 16 minutes from driveway to Pajarito parking lot/lodge!

torsten says this is day number one

We are two weeks into the new job and new Kindergarten, all our stuff (minus the car) has arrived. We miss our friends and community in Juneau horribly. Carrie has finally succumbed to the cold that Torsten has been sniffling and coughing from (and of course it is worse for adults!). So we are letting Carrie “sleep in” a bit (we were up at 3am and ~5:30am with Aven, so somehow it doesn’t seem like sleeping in!). I’m preparing some omelets for breakfast. While I do this, I’m catching up on the last few weeks of magazines. Physics Today has a review of the book “Lives in Science: How Institutions Affect Academic Careers” by Joseph C. Hermanowicz.

An excerpt from the review:

“n the National Research Council’s (NRC’s) assessment of graduate physics departments, two of the universities (“elites”) were ranked near the top; one(“pluralist”), near the middle; and three (“communitarians”), near the bottom.

The pluralists express the most satisfaction. Many, after some initia discontent, have found a comfortable mix of teaching and research and realize that internal as well as external sources of recognition are important for their sense of personal satisfaction. The communitarians, at universities where teaching dominates over research, feel they have become disconnected from professional science as their careers have evolved. By midcareer their expectations have adjusted to meet the low research expectations and meager resources of their universities. Many of the communitarians state that they dislike their universities and would not choose an academic career if they could begin again. They look forward to a retirement in which they can pursue interests outside of science.”

Did we make a good decision? Can we find a community? Will the forecast “winter storm warning” measure up? We hope so on all three, and we’ll see.. sooner or later. Hopefully this is not a broken egg (or at least no shell!) in the omelet of life.

I’m excited about the apple and brie omelets. And of course, to perfectly complement the subtext of this post, Torsten wants scrambled eggs…

Meanwhile, the view from the sunroom:

From Stuff

From Stuff

We’re almost used to our no-stuff monk-like existence, but we are giddy (and a bit fearful) when all our stuff is supposed to arrive Tuesday (will it fit? I’m calling storage places today!). It is hard to believe all that has happened since October 1, but we’ll catch up with ourselves soon. This picture shows that we mostly manage to keep our smiles and roll with the craziness

From December 2009

It is also one more test of facebook/wordpress (blog) integration. It might just work. It appears that embedded picasa slide shows don’t work, embedded bikely maps don’t work, but hopefully picasa pictures do make it through to facebook.