We’ve made it to Lake Tahoe, a small group of us to celebrate a friend’s birthday. Never in my life have I seen so much snow as on the drive up here, despite the temperature being in the mid-fifties. Snow piled up as high as six feet.

We arrived at a rustic cabin, with more TVs and ethernet cable than I would ever expect to see. Below, a fire in the fire place, a cheese and charcuterie board, wine, and two fuzzy blankets on a soft couch. At last I feel so cozy, grinning ear to ear in the warmth.

Over the past few days, I keep being asked: “Are you excited?”

My response has generally been: “I will be when I get on the plane.”

In part, it’s reflects what I’ve experienced in the past, in that I usually don’t get excited for any trip until a few hours before I depart. But in part, it is an aspirational response. I am hedging, saying “not yet”, delaying giving a more authentic answer. In truth, I am apprehensively nervous. I am not stressed. I am not anxious. I am just less excited than I thought that I would be. And that’s OK.

I haven’t been away from home for this long since I went to Switzerland as a summer research student in college. Back then I didn’t have an apartment, a car, a job, a cat, a comfy bed—nothing that I was putting on pause. At the start of this trip, the feeling of the things left behind outweighs the things yet to come because the things yet to come have not yet arrived.

Knowing myself, I won’t be excited until I start doing what I set out to do. So now it is time to go snowshoeing in Tahoe. A good first step.

I am Known as the Snail Guy

Often when I meet a new formling, the usual greeting is “oh, you’re the snail guy!”

My reputation precedes me.

Yes, I am known as the snail guy because I have 3D printed thousands of tiny plastic snails. Many times I have hidden them around the office. My desk is also littered in snail paraphernalia, 3D printed and otherwise.

After realizing that I am, indeed, the snail guy, I am asked, “so what’s up with all the snails?”

The story, it turns out, is not that exciting. At least that is my opinion of it. Others have told me that I am wrong. So I will repeat it here and you can decide for yourself.

The Origin Story

Back in the long, long ago, shortly after we shipped the Form 1, I was working on developing material files to improve print success.

Allow me to break down that last sentence a bit. The Form 1 was formlabs’ first product. We launched it on Kickstarter, raising nearly $3M from backers. It was a revolutionary product at the time—the first desktop SLA 3D printer. It promised customers a significantly higher part quality than any other printer at a much lower price point with much better usability. For fabrication material, the printer uses liquid resins (acrylate-based photopolymers), curing (solidifying) it with a UV laser like one you would find in a Blu-ray player. A material file is used to tell the printer exactly how to solidify the material. The material file controls laser power, speed, wait time, motor motions, and a variety of other parameters. By tuning the material file, we can get the printer to produce better parts.

At this particular time, the printers were having trouble printing successfully across the entire build area. Parts printed near the edges were more successful than parts printed near the center. To run tests with varying material files, I wanted a part that is quick to print, is pretty small, and is not too difficult from a printing perspective. I would print many of these parts, in a 5 x 5 grid on the build platform. As it so happens, I had downloaded several animal 3D models the day before, and the snail fit the bill. Within a few days, I had several hundred little plastic snails. I wasn’t sure what to do with them, so they just collected on my desk. As I began to amass an army, the person at the desk next to mine put a 3D printed shore crab model at the edge to defend her desk from invading snails.

It Begins to Escalate

Soon people around the office began to think I had a problem. It was becoming a joke that I was an engineer here only so I could invent new ways to 3D print snails more efficiently. Why did I have all these snails? For a while I told people I was printing these snails as part of a large prank. After a co-worker smashed cake in my face at the Form 1 shipping celebration, featured on Netflix documentary Print the Legend, I was going to get my revenge by filling his bed with snails one night. That act of revenge never materialized, but it was a good enough story until I figured out what I was actually going to do with all the snails.

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The Great Snail-Bunny War of 2014

At some point in the summer of 2014, I noticed that a few bunnies appeared in the snail garden. A few days later, I began to find more bunnies hidden around my desk and around the office in general. I was unaware who was putting these bunnies everywhere, and no one else could provide me with any valuable intelligence.

At last I had found a use for my massive snail army: mounting a large scale war against the invading bunnies.

Since I didn’t know who was responsible for all the bunnies, I had to start by removing enemy combatants from the battlefield. At first, they were put in a jail, but they multiplied like bunnies and the jail couldn’t contain them all.

The war got brutal. There were heavily losses on the side of the bunnies and very few snails lives were lost due to extremely aggressive tactics. After a couple of weeks the war ended. The bunnies disappeared. It was a decisive victory for the snails.

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While I won the war, I may have lost a few friends in the process.

The Snail Enthusiast

After the Snail-Bunny War of 2014, my friends and co-workers began to become more comfortable with my snail obsession. For my birthday the next summer, a few of them made these delicious snail cinnamon rolls to share with the team.

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As the years passed, I become known more and more as the snail enthusiast. Friends send me pictures of snails they happen across in everyday life. Occasionally, some snail item will show up at my desk, usually without any indication of who put it there.

So there you have it. The story of how I became a snail enthusiast. Fun fact: I don’t actually know that much about snails.

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A major goal for my trip is to spend a lot of time doing nothing. I want to forget what it feels like to be always busy, always rushing to the next thing. With an empty calendar and being far from home, I will have a great chance to do just that.

Still in Boston, I got a brief taste this afternoon. For a couple of hours, I wandered the streets of Cambridge near Harvard Square in search of Prius’s with progressive bumper stickers. To answer your question, I run an instagram account called Progressive Prius. I first had the idea a few years ago when I saw a blue Prius with an Elizabeth Warren bumper sticker drive by a Whole Foods in Cambridge. The car right behind it was another blue Prius with an Elizabeth Warren bumper sticker.

This afternoon, I collected a wonderful FIVE progressive Prius pictures! And I had nothing pressing on my mind when doing it. At one point, I stopped by a liquor store whose owner Mike enjoys wine, socialism, and cats. When I told him about my account and what I was doing, he gave a hearty chuckle (and follow). He was skeptical that the owners of these cars are actually progressive. Whether they live up to the account name or whether their stickers and cars are a cover for PINOs (Progressives in Name Only), we will never know.

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My day of departure is fast approaching, and I am as prepared as I would expect to be about a couple months out. Very little is planned, and my rough itinerary is markedly wrong and missing large chunks. A happy-go-lucky, play-it-by-ear attitude has permeated this entire trip planning process, and generally it has been intentional.

Today, two logistical surprises came up. “Surprises” is a bit of a stretch. If I had simply paid attention to what I was booking, they would not be surprises. The first surprise was my car rental. Rather than deal with the hassle of finding, buying, insuring, and then selling a car, I decided to simply rent a car from Palm Springs to Seattle. In my mind, I had one price that I thought I was paying per week, but reality did not match. The actual weekly price of the rental car was twice what I had thought. The total price is what I expected, but it turns out that I am incredibly bad at arithmetic when I am not trying to do arithmetic.

The second surprise was about the actual length of the trip. In my mind, this whole time, I have been saying and thinking that this trip is six weeks on the west coast. When planning out a rough itinerary—remember the one I just said was markedly wrong—some things felt a bit more rushed that I was expecting. Today I discovered that it’s because the trip I booked is actually one week shorter than I thought. It turns out that in addition to arithmetic, looking at calendars and comprehending what they mean is also not my strong suit.

None of these surprises bother me. They just caught me off guard. If I missed these very obvious things, what else, perhaps more important, did I miss? I guess I’ll find out in the coming days. Nothing to worry about, of course. A major part of this trip is not to worry, and I think I’m doing a pretty good job so far.

I woke up today feeling like it was just any other day. Per usual on Fridays, I stopped by Union Square Donuts on my way to the office and ate it with gloved hands as soon as I arrived. But today was different than any other Friday. Today was my last day at Formlabs—at least for eight weeks.

At the end of the day, my teammates gathered around the center table with delicious Elmondorf chocolate cookies that had bought for me to celebrate. Unlike the typical cake or cookies gathering for a departing formling, we all knew that I am not leaving forever, so it felt more upbeat. It was a nice sendoff, and I am grateful to have such wonderful co-workers.

Before leaving, I arranged my desk as I used to before taking a vacation—covered in snails. Due to the sensitive nature of my work, some things are [redacted]. A few fun snails to point out.

• Just below the center black box, you’ll see a snail with a white shell and a clearish body. From our new engineering line of materials, the shell is made from rigid resin and the body from elastic. It more resembles a snail than any other I have printed. Fun fact: we have wanted to develop an elastic-like resin since 2013.
• The blue snails scattered about are my experimentations with color kit. It’s my favorite resin in our Form X line. Colors are fun.
• The big snail at bottom right is the largest snail I could fit within the Form 2 build volume. During a paint night at work, I made it colorful.
• The big gray snail near the top left is an early Fuse 1 print from about a year ago. Unlike all the other 3D printed snails in this image, it is made using SLS, a process that fuses nylon powder.
• The big, white odd looking snail at the top left is a gift from a co-worker for Secret Santa a few years ago. The top of the hollow shell comes off and it is filled with smaller snails.

Hello internet friends,

I am about to embark on an adventure.

For the past seven years, I have been working as a mechanical engineer at Formlabs, a Boston-based 3D printer manufacturer. I have watched us grow from 5 employees to 500, from a small startup to a leader in the industry. After seven years of work, I have been given the opportunity to take seven weeks off. During this time, I will be heading to the west coast, driving from San Diego to Seattle, seeing friends and family along the way. Intentionally, I am planning as little as possible. I am writing this blog, in part, to document my travels.

Just as importantly, I am writing this blog to reflect on my travels. By taking a step back and putting my thoughts into words, I can look back on what is important and what is not, all the while becoming a better writer. That sounds pretty good to me.

What can you expect from this blog? Well, not much, to be honest. This blog is mostly for me and not for you. I can’t promise you great photos, because I am not a great photographer. I can promise you that the photos will be at least pretty OK and not have any stray fingers obscuring the lens or motion blur from moving the camera while taking the photo. I can’t promise you useful travel tips, because my traveling tends to be happy-go-lucky. I don’t tend to remember details on where exactly I went or what exactly I did. But I can craft a good story with some feeling. And I’ll probably make you laugh. At least there’s that.

I take off to the west coast next Thursday. In the time between now and then, I hope to share a bit more background—about my career, about this journey, and about what the deal is with all the snails.

So if you’re interested in following along, be sure to like and subscribe—which I think means adding this URL to your RSS feed. Do people still use RSS feeds?

OK before I end, I’ll add a picture. I hear pictures are pretty important for blogging.