as you know, we're in the opening round of the decadal survey, prioritizing astronomy research and facilities for the next decade - I occasionally suspect all of astronomy has shut down while all of us either write or read white papers and policy documents on some subfield or another...
anyway, Julianne over at CV came up briefly for air to summarize what is going on
what she said.
I scheduled my defense a few weeks ago. Having the chair of aforementioned survey on the committee made for an interesting piecewise solve.