Greetings from Boston!
I made it safely across the country to our new (temporary?) home on the East Coast.
We live in an apartment near the Harvard campus. The building was built in 1929 and has a plaque claiming that Nabakov lived downstairs from us shortly after his novel "Lolita" was published. We're subletting a furnished apartment from a Harvard law student that is away for the summer, which is quite a challenge -- we're trying to fit our one bedroom apartment's worth of stuff into a one bedroom apartment that already has another person's stuff in it! L arrived a few days before I did and started unpacking boxes, so the place was in pretty good shape when I saw it for the first time. She did an amazing job packing stuff into every nook of every room and has almost all the boxes unpacked. We've also got a pile of stuff to give away, which is sad because we just moved it all the way across the country for no reason. Other than that, the place is very nice with granite countertops, new appliances, and a beautiful courtyard outside with a hammock and plenty of flowers to enjoy during the hot Boston summers.
At work, I'm set up with a very nice desk in a windowless office at the Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. They have been kind enough to let me use their space to telecommute back to the USGS in Menlo Park. I put a little name plate outside my door with the USGS logo and several of the astrophysicists have stopped by to inquire about what's up. The building is on the outskirts of Cambridge right near a beautiful nature preserve, so I can go out and eat lunch at a picnic table watching a family of Canada geese, including their three month-old goslings.
We'll be here until mid-September, so look forward to future updates. After that, it's off to Japan!