I am … unhindered by talent

This is the address plate by the entrance to our part of the apartment complex in the UK. I like being in “Odds”.

I walked in from the house to the University for the first time this morning. It took about 45 minutes, and I was a tired, sweaty puppy by the end. Out of shape, out of shape, out of shape…

Now, after about two hours in the office, I get to walk back, as we have an appointment this afternoon with the deputy head at Sub-Evil Boy’s new school. (So glad to finally have him placed!) I’ll no doubt be all tired and sweaty again an hour from now…

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I drove to Ipswich this morning to return our rental car, so we’re officially sans auto from here on out (barring renting one now and then for trips yonder). From here on out it’s walking, buses, and/or biking, and I can assure you that we’re not really in shape for it. You’d think that will all the walking we do at home this would be easier, but we’re all quite tired after several hours of walking in to town for errands, etc., but we’ll all walk into shape soon enough now that we don’t have any choice. I’ll presumably start walking in to the office at least some this week, and Sub-Evil Boy (pictured above at the Reykjavik Family Park and Zoo at the start of our 00-01 sabbatical) starts school next week.

I’ve never been to Ipswich before, so I was originally planning on checking out a museum or two while I was there. University of Chicago geneticist James Shapiro came up from London today, though, to talk to Riccardo (Poli), Bill (Langdon), and I about evolution and genetic programming, which sounded cooler, so I bailed on Ipswich and had a nice geeky day talking about evolution.

The big question mark for me is whether to buy a bike or not. There is an active cycling group in Colchester and plenty of bike shops. These busy, narrow roads creep me out, though, especially when I think ahead to the short, wet days of winter. I found some plausible route options on a little exploratory walk yesterday, however, and I have yet to actually walk all the way to/from the office. Going home tonight is entirely on foot, though, so we’ll see how that goes.

It’s very sad to see how car-oriented Britain has become, even in the two decades that I’ve been spending time here. The congestion on the roads and contention for parking is just insane, and the cost of buses and trains certainly doesn’t help. This could be a really bicycle friendly part of the world (and probably was, many years ago), but that’s definitely less and less true.

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This, more or less, is the view straight out my office window here at the University of Essex. Very 60’s, eh?

It also looks really different it the sun than in cloud, and wet vs. dry. Unfortunately I think it looks kind of forbidding when wet and cloudy, which is more common here than sunshine and blue skies. In fairness, though, the view out of my office isn’t as prison-like as this might suggest - there’s a nice green space to the left that sets this off nicely. I just like all these lines too darn much, so I end up taking photos of this instead!

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There are many things George Lucas might need assistance with, but I wouldn’t have thought that making money was one of them. Someone, however, apparently believes that the the federal government should be in the business of providing him with even more publicity for his mighty Star Wars empire.

If the reports are to be believed,

The original prop of Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber from the first Star Wars movie will be sent into space aboard the space shuttle Discovery in October to commemorate the film franchise’s 30th anniversary, according to a joint announcement from Lucasfilm, the Space Center Houston and Southwest Airlines on Aug. 27.

This is complete with all sorts of palaver, including someone in a Chewbacca suit handing the thing over to the astronaut, and an honor guard of storm troopers and a caravan of gas guzzling monsters.

Thanks to Ar’alani for the photo, and Sub-Evil Boy for the pointer (via G4’s The Feed).

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Yesterday I had the happy experience of finding out that my photos were being used in two rather unexpected (but cool!) ways.

The first was completely out of the blue. I got a nice note from the on-line editor of Moreover letting me know that they had used one of my photos (”Alice, and her beside book of birds“) as the starting point for a new banner image (above) for their website. I don’t know anything about the blog than what a quick look around would indicate, but it seems a reasonable blog of book commentary and review, as part of a (new?) magazine (Intelligent Life) owned by the Economist magazine. They presumably found my photo through a search on Flickr (probably looking for books), so thanks to Flickr, and thanks to Mary and Larry, whose house the photo was taken in.

The second was a little less suprising, but still cool. Dad’s an active member of the Benton County Master Gardeners group in NW Arkansas, so I showed him my notes and examples on photographing gardens that I put together for a garden and art tour earlier in the summer. He then asked if he could share them with his group, and what were really just some rough notes have subsequently turned into the lead article in their monthly newsletter! Dad had told me that they were probably going to use some of my notes, but I certainly didn’t expect them to feature so prominently, or to be included in toto (over two issues).

Hee, hee, hee…

And just a few hours after posting this, I found out that a photo from our previous UK sabbatical is being used on the Tate St. Ives Wikipedia page!

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The British have had a pretty dreadful summer, with cold temperatures, lots of rain, and flooding. The view above was all too typical of our experience in our first few weeks here. Rarely much rain, but precious little sunshine either. This photo was taken on a walk Sub-Evil Boy and I made last week from our new apartment into the town centre and on to the school that he’s likely to attend to see how long the walk would be. (30-45 minutes to the school.)

The last few days, however, have been gorgeous, so there’s hope for a nice autumn. This is a weird little roof ornament in our apartment complex with a gorgeous blue sky to set it off. Almost looks mediteranian.

Still no intarweb at home, so only intermittent access to e-mail, blog, Flickr, etc. I think we’ve now figured out how we’re going to get internet (through Zen Internet), but we’ve got to wait a few days before our phone line is activated before we can actually start the wheel’s turning on getting that actually turned on.

We did our first big all-family walk into the town centre today and spent a bunch of money we only barely have. We had to get a (cheap) phone so we could use our new phone line, and we had to get a digital video recorder (a Tivo-like device) or the other two thirds of the family would have almost certainly hurt someone that looked a lot like me. We also bought some used linenes from a charity shop, and some other bits and bobs. We were absolutely pooped when we got home - a bunch of out of shape gringos not used to being on their feet for a few hours. More days like that, and we’ll get better (or die trying).

We also spent some time at the house we’d been staying in (courtesty of Riccardo - thanks!) out in Wivenhoe (continuing map fun). We had to get our last little odds and ends out of their, and do a little cleaning. This included a fair bit of vacuuming using a fairly paleozoic upright Hoover that had at least four useful properties:

1. It weighed slightly less than a newborn humpback whale.
2. It was almost certainly less noisy than a Sopwith Camel in battle.
3. It had an extraordinarily long cord. (This was usually a good thing, but it did make cord management a bit more complex.)
4. It would occassionally lift small bits of detritus up from the floor surface in question. This depended, however, on a somewhat mysterious confluence of requirements relating to (among others) the surface being vacuumed, the offending bit of fluff, and the position of at least two of the other planets in our solar system.

And did I mention that it was really heavy and really noisy?

Probably.

Hard to tell, though, since my ears are still ringing from vacuuming, which messes with my concentration.

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Sub-Evil and WeatherGirl chatting while they waiting for me to catch up after I stopped to take some photos. (They have to do that a lot, I’m afraid.)

We’re pretty much all moved in to our apartment, and had a splendid dinner with Riccardo, Catarina, and kids last night at their house.

Now trying to sort out internet at the house (damn, but that sort of stuff is complicated - why can’t it just ooze out of the walls or something!) and figuring out where Sub-Evil’s going to be going to school. One of these days I’ll have to start actually doing some research, but that’s likely to wait until early September, at least in any serious way.

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…it looks like we’re all set on the living front! We signed a lease on an apartment today, and do the walk through tomorrow, after which we can start moving stuff in! Now we just need to sort out Sub-Evil Boy’s school situation…

Read the rest of this entry »

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More from Mum’s garden!

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The University of Essex (a mile or so southwest of Colchester) was established in the early to mid-60’s (so it’s about the same age as UMM*) as one of nine new universities that were created in part to generate new university opportunities in a country where very few young people went on to university.

The University of Essex was born during a rare moment of national hope and enthusiasm in the early 1960s, when everything seemed possible and new departures seemed essential. Only 10 per cent of British school-leavers were going into higher education, which was palpably unjust and, for the sake of the nation’s future, unwise. So it was decided to found and finance nine entirely new universities, of which Essex was to be one (the others were Sussex, Warwick, East Anglia, Kent, Lancaster, York, Ulster and Stirling). — “A personal history of the University of Essex” by Professor Hugh Brogan

Unlike UMM, it was built from scratch, so the architecture is very much 1960’s concrete block stuff. The big block in the right foreground is the library (which I haven’t been in), an to the left is the beginning of the squares which form the bulk of the office/teaching spaces. The squares are hard to describe, and this map doesn’t really do it justice because it doesn’t capture the weird vertical dimension. The computer science department, for example, is in Square 2. Coming from the library end, you sort of feel like you’re on ground level when you enter from the courtyard, but it turns out that you’re on level 4, with three more levels below you. My office is on level 3, so you go down the stairs when you come in, but out my window I look down two floors to a parking area and green space as well as up to a pedistrian bridge that comes from the courtyard level across that green space. I’ll have to try to get some pictures over time that give a sense of how things are laid out.

Riccardo Poli (the fellow I’ll be doing research with) is in Italy visiting family at the moment, and we’re mostly working on getting our housing and school for Sub-Evil Boy sorted out, so not much work yet. Riccardo returns this week, though, and once we’ve got ourselves moved into our apartment and settled, then the sparks should start to fly!

*And about the same age as me, which is weird to think about.

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