 I love how every Zoom meeting ends with the wave. Some people are laughing about it. I think it's great. I think I remember how to do this. Welcome back to my basement, AstroVlog fans and fellow citizens of Earth. Do you remember like six months ago when I would be doing these videos almost every week and like I travel and go places and then like I brought my kids home and we used words like at least for the next few weeks or maybe months? So welcome back to my basement. Today is September 5th. It's 10 o'clock in the evening. My kids are asleep. So my three or four months into life as a professor, as a research professor and I have not been in my office. I'm getting a new office which I would love to show you and then figure out my new furniture situation and where's my new vlog camera angle and all that stuff is just that's going to be 2021. That occurs to me at some point. We will all be back together again. We will have those weekly meetings and those coffees and we're going to have these conversations like what have you been up to? And I thought it would be nice to just take a moment on this quiet evening and tell you some about what I've been up to which I'm already realizing I've forgotten a lot about what's happened because this has just been a monstrous blur. The number one thing that I've done and I've gotten up to is we decided to just start digging a hole and letting the kids play with shovels and we just dug up a huge... Oh man, the babies woke up. Okay, classic pandemic. Where was I? So we dug a big hole. We just started digging and we built a new patio. This spot in my yard used to be a playground like 50 years ago. We dug up all these like marbles and toy cars and stuff like digging up treasure. And so for the kids it was super exciting. I spent a million hours on the zoom and you know like it kind of works. I've had one haircut. It's time for another or to make some like fashion choices. The reason I got a haircut was because I gave a talk. So my plan tonight is to talk a little bit about what we are going to call the most mysterious stars in the galaxy. I thought it was a pretty fun talk. I got a new espresso machine. That was good. I've played a lot of Legos and puzzles and this was fun. A couple months ago, Mike Wong invited me to participate in a reading reenactment of an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation. And that was a ton of fun. I could have cost you your life. Data moves in and seats himself opposite Riker. Yes, that is true. I wrote one grand proposal. That took like 20 times longer than it normally does. We saw a comment. Did you see the comment? Likewise, I took a ton of photos. I was like sitting on my roof every night for like a week taking pictures and videos. My wife and I started a new Instagram account for like retro garage doors that we find in our neighborhood. Check it out. A new garage door every day. And I've made almost no substantive progress on my research. The truth is I spend at least two or three hours every day on zoom. My wife and I are sharing this office and sharing our time. There's not a lot of time for creativity or writing. So I've been trying to eke forward on a few projects, but it's just going super slow. I'm not sure I'm going to finish another paper in 2020. And that kind of hurts to say I've got a lot of ideas just stuck in the pipe right now. Hopefully I'll be able to do a little more writing, a little more thinking. If the last six months of 2020 have taught us anything, it's just not to make any promises. But thankfully my family and I remain healthy and a little lonely. And I wonder what are you up to? How are you passing the time? Are you able to come up with new hobbies now that you're trapped at home? Do you live somewhere where you're not trapped at home and they've actually done a reasonable job of taking care of this pandemic? What's that like? I'd love to actually hear from you. It's been quiet around here. Send me a message. Put a comment. Shoot a video. Tweet me. I'm here. I'm on the internet and I hope I see you again soon.