5th May
I'm now in New York, since my last day at Scripps (for the time being, anyway) was last Friday. I'll spend a week here, then come back to the UK for a couple of weeks, and then start work at the University of Rhode Island. Zoom, zoom....
It was a good final week though. My bubble program finally worked properly, so now I just have to write that up and then that section of research will be finished. And Adam and Julia came to visit, which was very exciting. Adam and I went scuba diving at La Jolla Coves. Visibility was pretty bad, but Adam was pretty sure that he spotted a shork. He even got a photo of it, which is below... see what you think.
This was just after we finished the dive. The visibility was pretty bad (see below - I think that's me, but I'm not sure). And then when we came up, there was loads of foam from the sea with algae in it splashing up against the cliffs.
We went to see the seals, all asleep on the sand.
20th May
I'm now back in Manchester for a bit, trying to catch up with everything and to chat to even more people. And to get some sleep. Life seems to be generating many early mornings at the moment. Hmph! I'm here until Friday morning and then I'll be off to Heathrow for an afternoon flight back to the Big Apple, with a bike in tow. A transatlantic bike is a new escapade, but apparently it's a routine occurance (and even free!).
Colin's wedding was last weekend and was lots of fun, attended by many of the usual suspects. And Northumberland was very pretty.
The gifts on all the tables were little whisky bottles like the one below - Colin's surname is Bell and a family friend who's a typesetter made personalised labels for the bottles. How cool is that?
A local tradition - Colin had to carry Rosie over a bench placed at the gate of the church.
Below, some of the girls at a whirlpool in the gardens where the wedding reception was.
We went for a bit of a cycle the next day...
30th May
Much running around has been going on recently. I have now started work at the University of Rhode Island. This involves lots of trees and green things and a lot of gormet food shops (posh people come here on holiday in the summer, apparently) and always being 5 miles from everywhere else. This was a problem for the first time today when I got a puncture and was a bit stuck for ways to get to work. I'm currently in student housing while I find somewhere else, and it's like living in a deserted youth hostel. At least there's no shortage of space and I did buy a very exciting new blue fluffy blanket. I haven't taken many photos yet but I'll try to remember to take more next week. Just at this moment I'm on the train to New York to see Luke and help out at the Science Festival there this weekend.
This is what the coastline in Rhode Island looks like.
ooh, and here are a few photos from Maryland, two weeks ago:
Sisuuk is starting to shed her winter coat... here she is elegantly enjoying some of the fluff being combed out.
We helped at the street part of the science festival in New York for a couple of hours this Saturday and earned some red t-shirts for our efforts. The proceedings were interupted by a thunderstorm when we were shooed out of the where I had been talking about the science of beans and Luke had been handing out maps and pointing people in the right direction. The favourite attraction was the dinosaur that you can see here. It was wearing a raincoat and pulling a cart, but it was pretty cute. In the one just below on the right, I think it was smiling for the camera.
We found a beach just an hour's subway ride from Luke's apartment in New York. Weird, eh?
