Hello and happy fall, from Maryland.
It has been a month surrounded by greenness, fall colors, small towns, and Bruno Mars :) The blue sky and the beaches ; small towns and the crab cakes ; museums and the history; it has been an adventurous swing into the fall!
I love masquerade balls. I always thought it's a place where you can hide a little from the familiar world and perhaps introduce yourself as Princess Consuela of your own castle. For me, past two months has been a similar exotic experience in Maryland with a new castle, scenary, people, and a dream job. While finding a new castle can be exciting, it was also terrifying to move across the country and go far away from the cacti world :) However, after two months, I'm slowly starting to love this place. I now have my go-to places here. The waterfront in the Georgetown, the National mall with the Washington Monument standing tall and surrounded by a rich and immense expanse of museums, small towns like Greenbelt, Frederick, and Bowie that are joyous vibrant hotspots where it's holiday season every weekend.
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center - To talk satellites everyday and see images from even the distant parts of the universe in NASA's hyperwall (23 ft wide and 10 ft high LCD screen that displays images/movies of varying themes every day. Last I checked, it was methane ice on Pluto captured by New Horizons mission ), it has been the most humbling experience of my life. I work at the Earth sciences division with the Goddard Modeling and Assimilation Office. I study the hurricanes using satellites and numerical models. Changing gears and working on hurricanes after spending my Ph.D in the aerosol world also makes me appreciate the beauty of data density from satellites for weather and availability of information at different altitudes (for those who don't work on aerosols - the information on particles is very limited when compared to weather data products and very few observations hold clues to what kind of particles exist at different altitudes).
What if someone told me 6 years back, "move across the country and all your dreams are just waiting to come true" - ah !
A picture from a beautiful small town in Maryland - Carroll creek park, Frederick.
More later !
