Santa Fe!

I moved here, jeez, almost a month ago. I'll start with some pictures of my 1,200-mile trip from Sacramento to New Mexico:
This here's a borax plant outside Boron, CA. Southeastern California is hot and mostly not very interesting, except for the huge wind farm in Tehachapi. That was neat, but devoid of good places to stop and take pictures.

In Arizona I stopped at a meteor crater. I think the lack of erosion in the southwest US preserves these things better than, say, Florida.


Eventually I got to Santa Fe, having burnt up 35.1 gallons of gas at an average 33.5 miles per gallon. Here's the house where I'm renting a room - it's the one just to the left of the front door:
I guess I should mention why I moved here - I'm a "visiting scholar" at the National Center for Genome Resources, which is a place that does some genome sequencing but also collaborates with a lot of other research centers around the country. I'm involved with the latter, having transferred here from UC Davis, where I was a lab assistant for a legume genomics project. For some light reading, here's the 2008 progress report for our research project. While most of my work at Davis involved actual molecular biology bench lab work, here in Santa Fe it's more of a desk job, working on using computers to analyze the data generated in the lab. I like working in the lab, but I also like the organized atmosphere which is pretty hard to find in an academic setting. NCGR sort of straddles the line between a business and a research facility, so it's an interesting mix of people.

Enough shop talk - one of the great things about living in Santa Fe is that it's nestled in the middle of a pretty beautiful natural environment. Last weekend I drove up the hill for 20 minutes and went for a nice morning walk:

Another unique thing about New Mexico: lax attitudes about fireworks. July 4th just passed, and people were setting off fireworks pretty much every day a week before and after - day, night, whenever. The house where I'm staying is a few blocks from a high school, and they had a pretty good display. Photographing them yields something not entirely reflective of reality, but so it goes.
That's all the pictures for now. Today we had some pretty amazing downpours - I got pretty wet walking the 30 feet to my car to go home. I guess this is the rainy season - the weather report had warnings of up to an inch of rain per hour. No storm drains, either.