14th November
The first of this month was my birthday and lots of fun things have been happening. Writing things here wasn't one of them, but I'm trying to catch up now.
Tom Cawdron, who was an undergrad with me at Churchill came to visit for a few days, perfectly timed to coincide with my birthday. Here's a picture of him outside my house, about to venture forth on our house beach cruiser, a weird type of bike which is definitely not built for zooming. It is a single speed and has no brakes. We also went kayaking and snorkelling and saw lots of sharks just off La Jolla Shores, but unfortunately the underwater housing for my camera hasn't arrived yet so I don't have any photos of that.
My birthday treat was a camping trip last weekend to Joshua Tree National Park, followed by a full body massage and a soaking in nearby hot springs. It was fantastic! And we saw a real live tarantula moseying along on the trail.
He was off to explore Pacific beach, where bikes like this are quite common. I think that he was pretty brave to ride it at all.
The spider was about 4 inches across. The baseball hat is just for scale.
There was a lot of desert scrub, like this.
Luke looking explorer-ish. And me, apparently with Joshua tree antlers.
Medium and small Joshua trees. And then a big proper one below.
This is pretty much what Joshua Tree national park looks like. And we saw almost no-one the whole time we were out there. The quiet was so nice....
30th November
I'm sitting on the floor in New Orleans airport, being one of the power socket-hungry people around the edges, needing to be connected physically to a crude oscillating current, even though gigabits of complex information fly can reach us through thin air. It's been an interesting week here, and I've learned all kinds of things. Unfortunately most of them weren't actually about bubbles. I've been attending a conference of the Acoustical Society of America, and I now know how gerbils can differentiate between human vowel sounds, how you can hear tornados before you can see them and some interesting things about the higher harmonics of pianos. The variety of things that come under the heading of "acoustics" is amazing.
Here are a few pictures of the French Quarter... I did find my bit of New Orleans culture in the shape of rice and beans and a thing called a muffeletta.
Also noticed recently:
At the coffee shop at Scripps, they sell a non-fat decaf latte called a "Why Bother". A good question indeed, methinks.
These are some of the streets in the French Quarter in New Orleans
A birthday update.... Luke originally insisted on buying a cheesecake with candles for my birthday but his brother accidently ate the cake. So a week later, there was a piece of cream cheese sitting around, and so we put it to use as a literal cheese cake and so I did get to blow out some candles.
I'm not sure why, but the beach near my house that normally has about 20 seals on it has expanded its population considerably. They're not even swimming around, just resting on the beach.
