Medpedia

Today I’d like to take a moment and share something a bit more personal than we normally do on Obesity Panacea.

I hope you don’t mind my straying off topic.

When Travis and I started blogging back in 2008, we were sharing a small office at Queen’s university; Travis was just finishing up his Master’s and I was midway through my PhD.

Since that time much has changed for both of us.

For instance, our old office no longer exists; the building which housed it now stands vacant.

Travis finished his master’s, moved to Ottawa, and is now happily married.

Even our blog has had three homes since inception (at www.obesitypanacea.com, at ScienceBlogs, and now on PLoS blogs).

Our long-time readers may also remember that back in April of 2010, I defended my PhD. A couple of weeks later, my partner, Marina, also defended hers.

Since my defense I have been a bit more absent on the blog, leaving Travis to do much of the heavy lifting in terms of content (Thank you buddy!) As some of you have been wondering what I have been up during this time, I’ll briefly explain.

You see, near the end of our respective degrees, some 10 years deep into post-secondary education, Marina and I had realized that we had allowed our work to overshadow our lives. We had let hobbies, friendships, and even our relationship become secondary in importance to filling our respective CVs with more publications, presentations and other tokens of academic success.

Thus, around the time we were finishing up our theses, we made a pact to remedy this imbalance.

Not surprisingly, within 3 days of Marina’s defense, the two of us were on a one-way flight to Ecuador.

For the first time in our lives we didn’t have the next step planned out.

And it was exhilarating.

Not to mention frightening.

Since then, we haven’t really stopped moving. Over the past year and a half, Marina and I have lived in four cities in 3 different countries, have traveled to over a dozen other countries, and have finally checked off a few items off of our bucket lists.

I’m actually writing these words from our current temporary home in Auckland, New Zealand.

When we first set off for South America, I hastily started a blog to document our travels and named it PhD Nomads.

At the time I had no idea how accurate this moniker would soon become.

Nevertheless, here we are, as our tagline suggests: “an over-educated couple on an extended ‘workation’.”

If I haven’t bored you yet, and you’d like to learn all the juicy details behind our currently nomadic lifestyle, please click here.

Also, if you would like to follow our adventure you can sign up for updates via email or RSS reader – just as you do with Obesity Panacea.

Finally, if you have any questions pertaining to any of the travel we have done, please feel free to contact me.

In the meantime, as we temporarily reside in New Zealand, I’ll do my best to write about our adventures in Southeast Asia over the past 4 months, as well as provide new content for Obesity Panacea.

Peter