A new-found appreciation for spring.

We sprang forward last night here in the UK, and spring decided spring forth accordingly. It was a gorgeous, gorgeous day today. Sunny, if a bit hazy, with temps in the 60s Fahrenheit. After an unproductive stint at the library, I went to the park in front of the Scottish Parliament, watched children and dogs play in the fountains, and read a book. Then I did a leisurely climb up Arthur's Seat, deviating slightly from my usual path to walk along the valley floor, stopping when I reached a rise across from the summit to bask in the late-afternoon sun and read some more. Saw my classmate Tom. May have gotten slightly sunburnt (in Scotland? Gadzooks!). Eventually reached the top, found a nice perch on a rock, and watched the sun go down at 7:30pm. The haze never went completely away, so I could barely see Fife across the water, but Edinburgh Castle looked like it was floating on a cloud.

I have a new-found appreciation for spring.  Where I'm from in the US, spring means a return to uncomfortably warm temperatures, and pollen EVERYWHERE.  I have wretched, wretched hay fever, so I'm unable to tolerate being outside for more than five minutes at a time during the first half of spring in central North Carolina.  But here, it means ever-increasing daylight, warmer temps, and more hospitable outdoor surroundings overall.  And it's wonderful.

Cheers, y'all.

Qualitative analysis. (Is a lengthy process.)

I loathe my Research Process class.  As soon as I get to feeling like I've got a good handle on my thesis, I learn something in lecture that completely shoots that notion down.  Tonight's revelation: I can kiss whatever tentative travel plans I had for July goodbye, because I'm going to need every waking moment (and probably every sleeping moment too) to analyze data.  I knew doing qualitative analysis was going to take time, but I didn't know it was going to take THAT MUCH time.  Urk.

Cheers, y'all.

St. Paddy's.

Nota Bene: The Scots take Saint Patrick's Day every bit as seriously as the Irish do.  What a night.

Cheers, y'all.

Trekking.

The hillwalking club's next trip is to Glen Shiel.  I would kind of like to go.  I've ridden through Glen Shiel several times on WIS trips, and it's an absolutely lovely place.  But after reading other peoples' accounts of hillwalking there, particularly the Five Sisters, I've decided that there is a very real possibility that this trip will kill me.

Lovely to look at.  Terrifying to hike across.

So I'm mostly likely not going to go.

However, thinking about all this today reminded me that I want to walk the Great Glen Way sometime this year, so today I set tentative dates to do it: May 17-25.  That's nine days: 1 day each to get to Fort William and back from Inverness, and seven to actually walk the thing.  Most of the resources I've seen break it into six stages, but I'm going to divide the final stage in two, because it's both the longest and the hardest.  The walk is 73 miles long in all, which averages out to about 10.5 miles per day if I do it over seven days.

I figure I need to do some training for this.  Luckily there are some long-ish walks nearby that I can do for practice.  The Water of Leith Walkway is about 12 miles long and runs from Balerno to the Leith Docks.  I walked the last mile or two of it, from Newhaven to the Leith Docks today, and it was fairly easy going and well signposted.  My original plan was to build it up a little at a time, adding a little more each time, but I think I'm just going to go ahead and attempt the whole thing this weekend on either Saturday or Sunday.

I'd also ideally like to do the Union Canal at some point before the Great Glen Way, to get some experience with multi-day trekking.  The Union Canal is 31.5 miles long and goes from Edinburgh to Falkirk.  I'd like to try to do this in 2-3 days, breaking the journey in Linlithgow, and perhaps Ratho as well.  If the Water of Leith goes well this weekend, I think I'll attempt the Canal next weekend, in lieu of going to Glen Shiel.  It's pretty much going to have to be next weekend, as I won't have another opportunity until early May.  April is going to be completely eaten up with writing papers and then family visiting.

On another note, I've decided I do want to do at least one more Munro this year.  But planning for that can wait.

Cheers, y'all. 

Approval!

Ailsa approves of my thesis topic, and now (and perhaps more importantly) Hugh, aka the guy who has pretty much been in charge of my entire academic life since last September, approves.  YAY!!!

Cheers, y'all.

Angst.

It's been a blegh few days.  I taught on Thursday afternoon, and as usual went "I could have done that, and that, and that better" afterward, but for some reason it got really, really under my skin this time.  I really don't know why.  The feeling that the Thursday afternoon class is a practice run for the Friday morning classes is not a new one, but I got plain depressed about that fact this time.  It's not fair to the Thursday students and I know it.

And then Vicki came home from the pub at 4:00 in the morning on Thursday night/Friday morning with about ten of her friends in tow.  Four oh damn clock in the morning ON A WEEKNIGHT.  I'll summarize by saying that I asked them to keep it down twice, and was woken up just as I was about to fall back asleep twice, once by someone opening my door thinking it was the bathroom, and then by someone knocking on my door thinking...I don't even know what.  I think I scared the guy out of his wits by answering the door in all my sleep-deprived glory with the greeting "In God's name WHAT?!?!"  Vicki came out in the hall just in time to witness this.  By 9am, they were still there.

So without ever really getting back to sleep, I went and taught my Friday morning tutorial.  Needless to say, I was in an absolutely murderous mood when I got there.  But running the tutorial was actually a welcome distraction, especially as I got to be a bit of a drill sargent with the activity we were doing.  Then I went and participated in an eye-tracking experiment, which involved a space-age-looking contraption being fastened to my head to track the movements of my left eye (because I am apparently left-eye dominant) as I looked at random pictures.

I lingered in town for a bit, had lunch at my favorite noodle place, and read.  I'm about 3/4 of the way through A Storm of Swords, and if GRRM keeps killing off major characters at this rate, there's going to be no one left at the end of the series.  But the most recent character death was one I've been rooting for since book 1, so there's a silver lining to everything.

I got back to my flat at about 2:30 in the afternoon, wanting nothing more than to take a nap.  And they were still there.  It took an hour and a phone call to my mother for me to regain my composure sufficiently enough to go into the living room and calmly ask Vicki if I could have a word in private.  I won't go over the details of that conversation, except to say that the living room was quiet as a tomb afterwards.  I don't know precisely when they all left, because they did that extremely quietly too.

In any event, I never got that nap.  I read for a while (this time a re-read of Katherine by Anya Seton) and watched a couple games of the ACC tournament.  I went to bed at 9pm and slept, almost without interruption, until 11:00 this morning.  Today I went grocery shopping, watched more basketball, and felt vaguely upset all day.  This is due in large part to the fact that Vicki and I need to have a much longer conversation about our relationship as flatmates and where it stands after yesterday's incident.  In spite of the fact that we both know I was absolutely in the right, I'm avoiding it.  Although I can rise to the occasion when absolutely necessary, I dislike interpersonal discord of any kind, even when I know I'm in the right.  It needs to happen, but that doesn't mean I need to look forward to it.

Tomorrow will be a library day.  Hopefully it will also be a sunny day, because it's been grey and cloudy lately, which has not helped this angsty mood at all.

Cheers, y'all.

Revised thesis topic is a go!

I had my second meeting with Ailsa yesterday, and it went super-well.  Talent development is a go!  My next step now is to keep reviewing literature and narrow my broad "What is appropriate development" question down to something more focused.  I'm getting to the point where I'm starting to recognize citations, and even go "I've read that paper!" when they come up.  So I must be doing something right.

The rest of this week is teaching and participating in experiments.  I somehow need to acquire a needle and thread before 4pm tomorrow, for the tutorial activity we're doing this week.

Sunset is now past 6pm.  The world is bright, and I love it.

Cheers, y'all. 

Weekend trip to the Netherlands: February 18-20

*See Shaina when she's in the Netherlands in February* - accomplished February 18, 2012

I got up wretchedly early in the morning to catch a 6am flight to Amsterdam.  Rather than getting a cab or walking all the way up to Waverley to catch the airport bus, I caught the N22 bus, which stops right in front of my flat.  It took longer and I had to share it with drunk people for part of the way, but it was cheaper.  The line at the KLM counter was stupidly long because the entire Scottish youth ski team (or something) was also getting the flight.  But I made my flight and got to Amsterdam safely.

From Schipol Airport, I took the train.  The original plan was to take the train from the airport to Arnhem, and then from Arnhem to Winterswijk, but I got on the wrong train at the airport and ended up in Utrecht.  Luckily I was able to get to Arnhem from there.

The cold snap that had most of continental Europe in its grip last month had eased up a bit by the time I got there, but it was still frigid.  It was early afternoon when I got to Winterswijk, and I walked the five minutes to my B&B, checked in, and then explored the town a bit. 

I love small Dutch towns.  There's something very cozy about them.  The houses are quite close to the street, and one can see straight into people's living rooms and kitchens.  And there's a sense that people don't mind you looking in - that they're content to share a bit of their lives with you.  There's also the fact that absolutely everyone rides bikes.  There's something about that that just exudes safety and neighborliness to me.  Maybe it's the fact that for a very long time, the only place I ever saw anyone ride bikes was the neighborhood in east Durham where I lived from age three and a half to age 14.

Winterswijk town square:

I had managed catnaps on the plane and also on the train rides, but I still took a proper nap at the B&B before going to the venue where Barrage was playing that night.  Barrage is a band with five fiddle players, a guitarist, a bassist, and a drummer.  As of last December, my cousin Shaina is one of the fiddlers. Here she is!

We had dinner in town between sound check and the concert, and caught up on over a year's worth of events in both our lives.  Even when we're both in the US, she lives in San Francisco whilst I live in North Carolina, so we don't get to see each other that often.  So it was incredibly, awesomely great that fate brought us near each other this weekend.

After dinner, we went back to the venue and I met the rest of the band and some of the crew.  I sat in the booth with the sound guy and the lighting guy during the concert, which was amazing.  Barrage ain't your average violin group.  Aside from playing music from all over the world, they run, jump, dance, and sing throughout.  There is also a fair bit of instrument-swapping.  At least two of the fiddlers also took a turn at the keyboard, the guitarist played fiddle at one point, and another of the fiddlers also played the tin whistle and the bagpipes (although not at the same time)!  When I heard him warming up on the bagpipes before the show, I momentarily thought I had fallen through a wormhole and ended up back in Scotland.  It's a very high-energy show, and I loved it.

The stage from where I sat:

Afterward, I hung out backstage with Shaina for a bit, had a beer, and just chatted about this and that.  Neither of us wanted to part ways, since it's so rare that we get to see each other and there's no telling when we'll see each other again, especially now that I live in the UK.  It's at times like these that I feel acutely just what I've left behind in order to be here.  I'm grateful to be here, but I do miss my family.  Especially the family I don't get to see that often in the first place.

When the band and I finally left the venue, it was pouring down rain.  They were able to give me a lift in their van back to my B&B, thank goodness, and I collapsed into bed after a very long day.

On Sunday the 19th, I had nothing in particular planned, so I spent the morning wandering around Winterswijk.  All the shops and many of the restaurants were closed because it was Sunday, but the place where Shaina and I had eaten dinner was open at lunchtime, so I holed up in there and did all the academic reading I had brought along.  Then I wandered some more, and eventually ended up back at the same place once again for dinner.

I left at mid-morning on Monday the 20th to start the journey back to Edinburgh.  I went to the train station, only to discover that the ticket machine only took credit cards and coins.  No banknotes.  I had to go into the station cafe to exchange a 20-euro note for ten 2-euro coins.  Ridonkulous.  Then it was back to Schipol via Arnhem (no mishaps this time), and then back to Edinburgh.

Me and Shaina!

Cheers, y'all.