I just got back from a great weekend (fine settimana) in Tuscany (Toscana) with a few friends of mine. One of them is one of my closest friends from Hopkins, and another one of my closest friends from Milan. It was actually quite surreal for me to see these two semi-separated worlds (home versus school, Hopkins versus Italy) merge and for my friends to get to know each other.

View from the Tuscany house

I’m still working my full-time job at a microelectronics company, and continue to enjoy the buzz of excitement that comes from being in a company working at the cutting edge of the high-tech sector. Every day has new challenges for me to face, and I’m working with a lot of technology and programming languages that I had never heard of before. For those of you technologically-inclined, I’ve been working a lot with an evolution of the S language called R and interfacing it with various software systems used by the company.

Abe strolling through a vineyard in the Chianti region

Honestly, I’ve been trying to slow down a bit over the last week. Summer has gone by too fast for my tastes (as it always seems to do) and I want to live my last month before going back to Hopkins to the fullest. Don’t get me wrong– I can’t wait to be back on campus– but I want to enjoy the things that I can’t get on campus while I still can.