Would it be worthwhile for you all to get a glimpse into my experiences this summer in parallel to yours? I'm thinking the answer is a very strong maybe, so I welcome any comments or questions as a periodically blog about my doings.

The last month has been utterly frenetic and borderline chaotic. After a disappointing Denny's breakfast (French Toast was tragically not on the build your own Slam (tm) menu) on Saturday AM in Socorro, I drove back to AZ w/Jamie and had 2 days to mold a new poster for the IRIS workshop in Washington State. Several key points on meetings like IRIS and EarthScope: 1) Students are encouraged to attend, 2) There is money for students to attend, 3) The meetings are often held in very nice places (in this case, a lodge overlooking the Columbia River Gorge). Conclusion: Go to every meeting you can. I do not advocate doing this simply to freeload, but actually small meetings like IRIS are an excellent way to get to know many people in the community. Kevin can attest to this. You can really set yourself up for scientific collaborations, including research positions and postdocs down the line by investing a small amount of time in networking. For me, IRIS is a nice opportunity to see friends I've met over the years, and I spent a long weekend with my buddy Aaron Wech (seismology graduate student and former IRIS intern mentor at UW) in Seattle.

Upon returning to AZ, I promptly got knocked flat on my butt with what the health center nurse described as an SDV or "Some Damn Virus". The virus didn't seem to care that I pop a couple Flintstones Kids vitamins each day to keep my immune system frosty. If 5 days of body aches and a 100-101 (still cooler than the Tucson air temperature from 1-4 pm) fever weren't bad enough, it completely shelled my plans to get a running start on some datawork for a seismology workshop that I am currently attending in Red Lodge, MT. Luckily I recovered with enough time to unravel some matlab mysteries and produce good (not great) Common Convension Point receiver function profiles for ~170 stations sampling the entire Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. At the workshop the other seismologists and geophysicists are currently trying to reconcile differences in the data and prepare for a unified set of publications to be submitted in the fall. My receiver functions play a large part in our developing story for how the Sierra are evolving, and it's exciting to be a part of crafting that story. By the end of the week I will be wandering with a couple friends across the still very snowy mountains of Wyoming. After the 4th of July it's back to Tucson for a solid 6 weeks of work crafting the final receiver function images of the Sierra and writing a manuscript for this dataset. Additionally, I'll be helping Jamie spearhead is project, which also looks to play a part in our interpretations of the Sierra.