 New year, new activities, new goals. January 3rd, 2023, first day of school. I think my very first double AS meeting was in 2007. It's the first one I remember. Double AS, Seattle, 2007, still a good umbrella. Welcome back to my office. Welcome to 2023, my astro vlog friends. I've sat here many times over the years and said to you, this is gonna be a year of changes, lots of changes, hopefully things changing. And once again, it feels like that is upon us. Now, as you may know, I apply for things constantly, mostly grants. So this is usually long grants to NASA or to the National Science Foundation. Since my position as research faculty is primarily supported through grant funding, I have to be applying constantly. I'm really excited that after several years of worldwide turmoil and also personal turmoil, I have a big grant. Now, I'm sure I'll talk more about this in the coming year or a few years. It's a three year grant to study the activity cycles of stars using flares. I'm really excited about it. I think it's gonna be really neat. I've given a few short talks about the idea recently. I'm thinking about a lot of long-term projects. One of the students I'm working with will be giving a press release, a press conference at the upcoming double AS meeting. Look for that in a week. A whole bunch of my other students will be presenting their work and networking. Hopefully, we'll get a bunch of them on camera next week and we will share that with you. I don't know if I will be able to do a daily video because I'm old and I got a lot of things going on. But I will bring the camera every day and we will shoot video. And the job continues to evolve. There will be new challenges this year, hopefully some new opportunities, hopefully some improved stability. I don't know. Right now, things remain kind of uncertain about what this job is long-term. I'm trying to balance hope and cynicism and not give myself into either of those too much. Trying to be realistic and work on the things that are right in front of me. And speaking of what's in front of me, check this out. All right, that's too heavy. I'm not gonna hold that. One of the very neat things I'm doing this quarter is teaching. I love teaching. I like being in front of the classroom. I like the performative aspects of it. It also is like the academic superpower thing. Not teaching is not superpower. It's the knowledge you gain when you teach is like incredible. It's second to almost nothing. So last winter, I got to teach an upper division undergraduate class called stellar theory and observations or something like that. And it was so much fun and a lot of work and I put so much time into it. It was great. I didn't post on YouTube almost at all last year but I did upload more than 30 hours of lectures. They're just not public. Should I make these lectures public? I don't know. I think they came out really well. I'm very proud of the academic product that I produced. Am I ready to share all 30 hours of these lectures? Maybe, I don't know, they're interesting. Starting this afternoon in just a few hours, I will be teaching my first lecture of a graduate course. And I'm very excited about this as well. This is called galactic astronomy. Sometimes it's been referred to as galactic structure. Sometimes it's galactic galaxies. It's gone by a lot of names over the years. I'll be teaching it as sort of Milky Way, galactic structure, galactic astronomy. Hopefully this class will be my love letter to Gaia or something. And like last year, I will record all the lectures, probably by a Zoom. And I don't know what to do with them. I will save them. I will upload them somewhere. Okay, the story behind this is when I took this class almost two decades ago, I took it from my thesis advisor and these are her notes. Now this is a lot and you know, you might look at this and think it's ridiculous, but this is in fact an extremely efficient long-term storage solution because there's tons of notes, but there's also, wait, transparencies. Now if you didn't grow up in this era like I did, this might seem a little silly, but you know, in the old days, we didn't have PowerPoint. We used a literal overhead projector and it projected light through this plastic that you could write on as an instructor or we were fancy, we had a printer. And so my instructor, my mentor, printed lots of stuff and annotated it and it's all in this binder. So there's tons of context. There's tons of knowledge and assignments and ideas. It's 20 years out of date, but the foundations are incredible and the detail is astounding. So what do I do with these lectures? What do I do with 30 hours of YouTube videos that I shot last year? What am I gonna do with the 30 hours I'm about to shoot this year? In 20 years will I be able to hand off my keynote slides and these YouTube links to my student who's teaching this class? Will it still be useful? Will it be as useful as this binder has been to me? I don't know. This to me suggests that we should make things public now. They are useful now. This is a format that works today. I should make it public now, I guess. Anyhow, 2023, new hopes, new challenges, new opportunities. Keep looking up.