“No wonder you never had a date in grad school.”
That’s Sarah, looking at a photo of me from the late 1980s. Please don’t judge her harshly; you haven’t seen that photo.
It was wonderful to have Sarah visiting me at Santa Cruz for the first time, and apparently my cleanup (see last post) was sufficient for its purpose: to avoid scaring her off. We did a lot of eating, went to see some music, and spent some time looking at my old photos after walking on the beaches of the California coast at sunset.
Sarah last came to our campus many years ago as a prospective student of Astronomy; she ended up studying Anthropology elsewhere instead. Now she’s back on our beautiful campus, and I figure this is a good time to show it to you, as well. After all, the site says, “Meet the Astronomers…See where they work…”.
The Santa Cruz campus of the University of California is beautiful chiefly for what the University has left untouched rather than for what it has built. The land used to be a ranch, and some of the old ranch buildings have been adapted for the use of the University. But most of the buildings are a mix of modern styles. Some I like, some I don’t, but I don’t *love* any of them (my taste in architecture is barbaric — meaning that I mostly like things that are old). But between the buildings are huge groves of redwood trees. The trees sprout up out of little canyons that are spanned by footbridges, part of a series of paths connecting the different clusters of buildings. Then there are huge, rolling fields. From the top of the hills in the fields, you can see the Monterey Bay. From the door of my office, I can walk for 10 minutes and be in the middle of a completely wild redwood forest, with almost no sign of humanity nearby. I don’t do it nearly as often as I should.
A footbridge on the UCSC campus (from www.ucsc.edu)
The department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at U. C. Santa Cruz is one of the biggest and best in the US. Maybe even #1, if it is possible to make such rankings meaningfully. I can say this without blushing because I am not part of it. I work in the Department of Physics. I think we’re pretty good too, of course 
