And just like that, I have moved across the Atlantic to Boston, where I will be for the next year. There are two reasons for this: First, daughter #3 – a bona fide US citizen who moved to Norway as a two-year old – wanted to spend her middle high school year in the United States. She did not want to go with one of the standard exchange programs, because with those you cannot choose where in the US you will be (which essentially means you will be somewhere in the mid-West.) Secondly, I was due for a sabbatical. In both cases, Boston is a good place to be.

So, daughter #3 is now at Brookline High School, and pater familias has infested MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research. This is a academic research group that in its structure and processes operates very much like CSC Index and Concours Group, companies I previously have worked for. In fact, CISR is in the same building as CSC Index used to be (five Cambridge Center, on , only three floors lower. It is very much deja vu – I have already had lunch at the Poppa & Goose truck (now called something else, but the food is the same.) The last week has been busy, getting a great apartment in Brookline (with good help from friends), buying an old (well, old by American standards) but great Mercedes station wagon for transportation, buying used bikes and doing the necessary runs to IKEA for what Douglas Coupland refers to as “semi-disposable Swedish furniture. We even got a whiff of Hurricane Irene, with loss of power for 10 hours and many threes down in the neighborhood.

The rest of the family, for various reasons, could not come with us, but visits are planned (the first one this week) and a long Christmas vacation already booked. Despite having a sabbatical, I still need to go home to Oslo for the occasional executive course, but hopefully not too much – the whole point of a sabbatical is not to have to think about teaching and administration.

Oh well. I see this year as a visit to an intellectual candy store – CISR cohabits with MIT Center for Digital Business, MIT Center for Computational Research in Economics and Management Science, and MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, just to mention some of the closest neighbors – a candy store where gorging does no harm but, indeed, is encouraged.