I last posted here in June of 2018 (almost 4 ½ years ago). I was attempting to catch up on posting about each week of my then new graduate class on open and reproducible science (the class ended in April of that year). I never did catch up.

Life events that began a few years before 2018 were, and still are, very challenging to experience. I suppose I felt that focusing more on professional tasks, such as teaching new courses and taking on additional roles with journals and so on, would help me move on. But it didn’t. Instead, additional challenging life events that I would normally be able to absorb and handle stopped me in my tracks and I dropped the ball on several commitments. That made me feel very guilty. Then in late 2019 I was surprised to experience briefly professional harassment from a known colleague privately via email. When I told this person that I experienced their actions as harassment, they replied that they did not agree with my assessment. Then of course, early in 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Life still has not returned to “normal”. It has all been very overwhelming, and it took me a while to realize that I was not going to “feel better” and pick up where I left off years earlier but rather that I needed to find a new starting place. I am not 100% certain yet what that starting place looks like. Life within my profession is not as enjoyable for me as it was in the past, but life outside of work is better. So for now I will consider this my starting place.

What I really want to do now is finish something that I started—complete a few blog posts about the remaining weeks of my graduate course on open and reproducible science (5 more posts to go). I have taught this course two times now and really enjoyed it each time. We’ll see if I get to adding more posts on other topics to this space after that.

Take care and be kind to yourself.