Moving

Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans – John Lennon

Over a year ago, my father passed away. A few weeks after this happened, my mom and I had to take my sister to San Francisco to see about the deteriorating condition of my sister’s kidney. Cathy, my sister, is handicapped, having some sort of syndrome which doctors have really never been able to identify (she is about three feet tall, has one side bigger than the other, and is the joy of my family.) Over the next few months, the doctors we saw became more and more concerned about her kidney until a little over half a year ago, she had a tube inserted in her abdominal cavity and went onto dialysis.
My mom and my sister live in the town where I grew up, Yreka, California, a small town of around 7000 people in very northern California. Because of my sister’s size, the doctors she needed where pediatric nephrologists. Needless to say there aren’t any such specialists in Yreka, the closest being located in San Francisco (five hours south) and in Portland (five hours north.) The stress of taking care of my sister (hooking her up to the dialysis machine, worrying about infection, etc.) was (and is) quite a stress on my mother, especially with my dad just recently passing away. (Oh, and if you want to more bad news on top of all this death and kidney failure, my mom had to put down our family dog during the same time period. When it rains, it pours. On us it poored ugly mad muck.)
So while all of this was happening, I realized that I needed to get closer to Yreka or to get my mom and sister closer to me. There was also the problem that living in Yreka was looking like less and less of a viable option for my mom and sister. Which is hard because my mom has lived in Yreka for thirty some-odd years. Adding another element to the equation, my two cousins on my mom’s side both live in Seattle, Washington, a place with good pediatric nephrology and a reasonable place for my mom to move to. There is also the consideration of a kidney transplant and me and my cousin’s being in Seattle would make it the easiest place to pursue this avenue. So I then began a quest to see if there was someway that I could get myself to Washington. Needless to say, the last year has been filled with more than a few days in which I contemplated whether I would be able to continue my career in academia. The choice was always easy, in that I knew that if I could help my mom and my sister, and that this meant that I couldn’t continue along my career in academia, well then helping was clearly the right decision. The combination of not considering leaving academia as being a failure was, however, fighting dearly with my desire to continue to do the work that I so love.
Fortune, however, finally decided to smile upon my family. The smile came in the form of Professor Mark Oskin and the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering department. I’m happy to announce that I will be starting a position as a Research Scientist in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of Washington starting May 1st. I am very very excited about this move, not only for bringing some much needed relief to my family, but also because I really like the CS&E department at UW and was excited by the interest expressed towards quantum computing by those I talked to when I visited the campus a few months back. I’m beyond so far lucky to get this opportunity, it makes winning the lottery seem reasonable.
There is, of course, some sadness at having to leave the Santa Fe Institute so soon. When I moved here, I imagined that I would be spending two years in Santa Fe. The people at SFI are truely awesome and the diversity of such a small place is pretty astounding. Plus SFI has an attitude which says that one must push the boundaries in order to do really good science and that the big questions are what you should be working on, not the small routine science. But mostly I will miss the people from SFI-tea time listening to them discuss life, the universe, and everything will be dearly missed (not to mention the amazing number of snacks at the SFI tea time!)
And so, another chapter begins. Oh, and if anyone knows of a two bedroom two bath apartment within reasonable distance of UW, let me know!