I visited Prague last week to distract myself after my cat Misha died way too early (he was only 6). And it was quite an amazing visit, in every way. Something about it made me forget my worries (can you guess what?)

More importantly, I met once again my very first postdoc Zuzka (Patakova) as well as my good friend Martin (Tancer). As is long-establish precedent among postdocs, Zuzka had to share some of her blueberry cake with me. But we also made some amazing advances, proving that realizing simplicial 4-polytopes is at least as hard as existential theory of the reals as well as investigating cool questions about spaces with prescribed geodesics.

Let me close with some overdue congratulations: My former postdoc Gaku Liu (now a professor in University of Washington) extended some joint work of him, Michael Temkin and me to prove an old conjecture in polytope theory: Every sufficiently large dilation of a lattice polytope admits a unimodular triangulation.

Oh and my coauthor Vasso has succesfully defended her thesis. She will be joining my team in the fall to work on my new ERC project. Congratulations Gaku and Vasso!