Ups and downs. Mostly ups. Things have never been stranger. As they say, a smooth sea never made a skilled sailors.

Something really cool: I'm unofficially spearheading our efforts to export our sustainable transport knowledge across borders. Three weeks ago, we were notified of a tender to do a study into early EV adopters and where / how they will charge... in Cape Verde. We had less than a week to apply, and in that time I wrote 90% of the offer, got a Portuguese transport company along for the ride and fixed most of the required documents. Last Friday I heard we won the tender! So I get to fly out not once, but twice to Cape fuckin' Verde in the next three months along with the owner of our company. And the advice we'll give them by the end, if they like it, will pretty much decide their steps forward. They intend to start building charging infrastructure next year. So it's a good opportunity for us as a company to show what we're worth, and if it's a success story there are many sunny Medditeranean islands where similar EV solutions are possible.

The only downside is that as it stands now, I'll go there first week of June, which means I'll be back for two days from visiting Seattle before flying out again. And the weekend after I have a trip planned with my girlfriend to Cologne. So aaahHHHH LOGISTICS, but also fuck yeah LIFE.

Today I had a really cool meeting about my academic paper. Which yes, is still a thing, but no, it's not moving fast at all. But I feel like I have found a small group of people who are just as passionate about equitable transportation as I am, and they want my help to figure out how to bring it into practice and make the world better in as much places as possible. They're practical, networked and smart people, and I'm the academic in this equation. With only my master thesis and not-published paper. I have no idea where this will lead but I'm already invigorated.

The rest of my work is busy AF. That new colleague that was supposed to start May 1st? He bailed out two hours before signing his contract and meeting us. Which is not only incredibly rude, it's also frustrating as all hell - I have all these cool new avenues to explore and a bunch of projects to offload and I can't offload them until there's someone to offload them to. And there's now a lot on my plate, enough for me to work much more than I want to. Did 5 days of work in 4 last week and it feels too much like a grind. I can't complain too much though, as most of the work is interesting or engaging, but there's just so much of it.