I&#x27;ve registered with SAM (System of Award Management) so I can get grants directly.  I still collaborate sometimes with academics, writing papers and grants, and minor consulting for them.  I&#x27;m also still an affiliate of my post-doc school so I have an email address and journal access, but I think you can basically buy library access from a school for a decent price.<p>I spend about half my time or a little less on consulting, but it&#x27;s been very research-oriented consulting so far, with few restrictions on publishing results.  There are and will be ups and downs (most of my consulting is in energy) but I bill a lot more than I pay myself so that smooths it out a bit.<p>So far most of the non-consulting research has been unpaid but I try as much as is practical to get funding for it at some point--make a minimum viable product to write a grant upon and if it doesn&#x27;t work out then make it publishable and iterate or move on.  I like strategy, it combines well with dreaming. I have some moonshot ideas too, but most things can be broken down into units digestible for peer &#x2F;grant review.<p>I&#x27;m finding that there are a lot of theoretical problems that are also practical problems.  I also feel like I am doing research all the time, but a lot of time is spent building tools and skills to do new things, and less of my time is spent actually learning new things about the earth than I would like.  But I guess that&#x27;s research...