With this post I would like to present a short update of my personal life to the few readers who are interested in that topic. You know, when I started writing online (over 20 years ago!), blogs used to contain a much more personal, sometimes introspective, description of the owner's private life and actions. Since long, they have been substituted by much more agile, quick-to-consume videos. But the old-fashioned bloggers who stuck with that medium continue to have a life - albeit certainly a less glamorous one than that of today's influencers; so some reporting of personal affairs is not out of place here. 
In particular, I have never had any issue with sharing private aspects of my life in this column, and it looks as if I never got any catastrophical repercussions from that attitude. On the contrary, besides making the blog more entertaining to some readers (and more irrelevant to the few who were only looking for scientific content), I think it has been useful as a way to meditate on my own life choices and ups/downs, taking a step back from the actor's role and looking at things from the eyes of a reporter.

So, what is up with me lately? Lots of things have been going on! For starters, I moved the barycenter of my life to Lulea, a small town at the top tip of the Bothnian gulf. There I have used in the past two years a Guest Professor grant to get invited to do research at the Lulea University of Technology (LTU); but until recently, that boiled down to only about three months of presence in Sweden per year, while now this is going above the fifty percent mark. 

The reason for this change is twofold. On the one hand, the research topics that brought me to collaborate with LTU have grown into a robust line of research on Neuromorphic computing, end-to-end optimization, and detector readout developments with nanophotonics; this makes it necessary for me to spend more time here. On the other hand -but you could see it as a correlated datum- my wife has started a Ph.D. in the Machine Learning group of LTU.

Living in northern Sweden has pluses and minuses. The latter are mostly degrees of temperature in the winter, wich combined with the scarce illumination in December and January make the proposition of spending winters here a bit scary. The former are a higher quality of life, more contact with nature, less air pollution, and a sort of peace of mind that I cannot quite explain. Lulea is a small town (I think it has about 80,000 inhabitants or so), and it does not offer very much in terms of cultural activities, admittedly; but the woods and lakes around here, and the natural life, are very nice. 

For me, having a pristine forest to walk in, at a three minute drive from my office, is really refreshing. And during this time of the year I enjoy picking up mushrooms, which grow undisturbed and plentiful. Last Sunday, e.g., I hit my "personal best" in that compartment, as within less than two hours I brought back 20.5 pounds of Boletus Edulis (45 of them), which were promptly cooked and stored as 12 separate plastic bags in my freezer. They will offer yummy moments during the cold winter months.

From a scientific standpoint, besides having started to direct interest and efforts in neuromorphic computing applications to detector development, things are not very different from what they were in the past. I have recently stepped down as coordinator of the MODE collaboration, a position that was taken up by my former student Pietro Vischia; and I took on the coordination of Working group 2 of the EUCAIF initiative in exchange. My term as President of the USERN organization is expiring on November 10, but I am running for a second one (we will soon get results of that). 

This year I have also accepted to be Editor in Chief of an Elsevier journal (Results in Physics). Another change is that I left the contract Professorship position at the Department of Statistical Sciences of the University of Padova, where for the past six years I had taught a course on particle physics to Master students in Statistics. The freed-up time allows me a bit more slack with the research activities I have taken on with LTU. And I am participating in a new experiment - TAMBO, a search for ultra-high-energy tau neutrinos with a ground-based array that is designed to be built in Peru. I will write more about this last exciting project, where I am involved in the end-to-end optimization of the array layout.

So, overall the above pictures a rather dynamical situation, rather in line with my lifestyle. "Moving from one failure to the next" is a good recipe for success, they say. Well, I don't know about successes or failures, but moving keeps my mind young. The challenge of integrating in a different environment, learning a new language (it's tough!), understanding different ways of life, laws, bureaucracy, and everything else connected with spending time in a foreign country, is definitely a challenge. It helps that I am facing it jointly with my wife, so many things get sorted out before I even realize they are coming at me.

I also realize that in these past few months my blogging rate has gone somewhat further down, below what I consider decent. I am working at it and want to change this situation, as this blog is really a special little place in the garden of my life and I want to keep cultivating it.

I think I am going to leave you with a picture of my real garden, which we can actually use only for a part of the year - here there is significant snow on the ground from November to April. If you like abstractions, you can picture my typical day by imagining me having a coffee sitting at that table, watching the grass grow. Nothing farther from the truth.