The posts are all in chronological order, so if it looks the same as last time you were here, scroll down a bit to check that there's nothing new at the bottom.
3rd June
It was a four-day week, since Monday was Memorial Day (apparently the Brits are not the only ones to have random bank holidays), so the week got off to a good start. Steve Lau took me along to his lab bbq - he was a postgrad at Churchill a few years ago and he's now a med student here. They let me loose with a softball bat, which is what the picture on the right is. Softballs are about the size of spherical mangos (it's an imaginary fruit, but I'm sure that the European Union will one day introduce a standard for it), and so they're pretty easy to hit.
At work, I built a high-speed strobe camera with what I could find in the lab (they did have strobe lights to start with) but it hasn't taken any pictures yet. Next week, perhaps...
And today I went to explore downtown La Jolla a bit and I found the seals and the pelicans. Pelicans are bizarre things - they look so archaic. You can just imagine them flying around bugging the dinosaurs. I'll have to take my decent camera down there and get some proper pictures of them.
16th June
This week seems to have gone by very fast. Last weekend was Nathan and Yolanda's wedding so we had a mini Churchill reunion in San Jose (see here for the photos). And now I do know the way to San Jose, six years after someone first asked the question. This week in the lab, I proved that I have a face that can launch a thousand bubbles, by photographing more than 1000 in one day on Thursday. Most of them are somewhere in the pinching-off bit between the two examples on the right - it takes about 100 ms to get from one to the other. And next week, I have to actually look properly at them.... hmmm.
I found a new place to live, a little bit south of La Jolla in a house which is right by the beach. I'll be sharing with Ayana, who has lived there for a year or so already. It's a lovely house, and it has a proper garden!
I have also very reluctantly come to the conclusion that I need to buy a car. This is made worse by the fact that it seems I'll have to buy something that I would consider to be a large car, since small cars are so new here that you can't buy them second-hand. Boo hiss!
This is the beach right next to where I'll be living.
I went to a birthday party at a very big house with a pool and a sort of built-in outdoor bbq. It sounds like a dangerous combination to me, but apparently it's not uncommon here.
And I found the "Granite Bear" on campus. The bear is apparently the symbol of the University of California, so they made a large teddy bear next the the engineering department. Isn't he cute?
24th June
I went surfing for the first time yesterday and again this morning, which was no end of fun. I could stand up by the end of it, but I'm pretty sure it didn't look very stylish. It also gave me a good look at the sort of bubbles that are relevant to what I do in the lab - the big ones, formed right as the wave breaks. I've spent this week trying to photograph the details of the jet that squirts up into each new bubble when one big one breaks into two smaller ones. It's awkward to get the lights right - the photo on the right is sort of cheating because the bubble rate was very high which makes the jets bigger and easier to see. Fun stuff though.
I also did the photography at a sea turtle fundraising event, exactly ten years to the day after I first had contact with this organisation. I worked on a sea turtle conservation project in Baja in Mexico and it was only just after that that I got my first e-mail address, so I've been on this e-mail list longer than any other. I've been deleting the e-mails for ten years, since I was never anywhere near here and now here I am again. One of the Principal Investigators of the project was even there at this event... pretty bizarre.
