Small town wife is the one with the job here. So, she is not staying behind....I will go back once or twice in the fall. We are in Columbia MO. Wife, who is/was French, actually pronounced the state "Misery" but realized she had to correct that. I am going to keep working out of UCSB for now, because if I moved my "soft money" position here I would get zero benefits unless I could keep 75% funding, and zero pension unless I could keep 75% salary continuously for 5 years, which is pretty much impossible for me and these days for most researchers. I have managed to build up 5 years service in California (it took 12 years to do this) and I am vested with a tiny pension...but each 50% month I work increases that slightly.
Maybe if I can get more efficient and publish some papers more quickly with high impact, and get some good collaborations going with U MO people, I can up the salary %....but I would really need some "hard money" salary. I have expertise in seismic reflection processing and interpretation, and use of industry 3D softwares, and ability to represent and model structure in 3D, that is mostly lacking in department as far as I know. The department would have to decide I was useful and I would have to figure out how to train students in some of this without lecturing (which I will not do). But, in the unlikely event that I could get 25% salary that way, it would cut into my time to do research so that maintaining the remaining 50% would be more difficult. Basically depressing. I give a talk here in early October and I better do a good job to set initial impression....

Hey John V....congratulations to Liz Cochrane. Why don't you do a short post on your and/or her recent research.
Chris