Friday afternoon, and it’s been a six-day working week. But the next time this bell dings, I can go home. And I am the one responsible for dinging it this time round. I’ll wait until the appointed time, though.
The ‘Knowledge Building Summer Institute’ conference got me to Wageningen last year. No chance (or, at least, no money) to get out to Montreal for the 2023 version, however, so it was a day in hybrid-land for me. Or rather, thanks to the time difference, an evening. And on a Sunday too. But a voluntary one, and fairly interesting.
On the basis that it was going to be warm enough to sit outside, colleague Louis stood by the exit out to the courtyard. However, today was about 10º cooler than it’s been lately — so we met inside in any case. I was running a couple of minutes late. But I did see him down there, patiently waiting.
Having walked around eighteen miles yesterday, I did not leave the house today and got on with necessary work, stuff like online teaching (two of those), marking (lots), etc. Exciting it was not. Playing with some effects on my relatively new camera was as much as I managed. This is a truly naff image, I accept that, but so went the day.
I said on Tuesday that campus was busying up. I withdraw that assessment after today’s visit, on which I reckoned I might have been the only member of uni staff in the whole Ellen Wilkinson Building that turned up today. And I only really did that for the step count. I have worked (occasionally) in the EWB for coming up to 18 years now, and it does not ever get much more visually interesting than this.
Did something I have not done for 11 days and went onto campus. It seemed busy today: ‘revision week’ has kicked in. This student was one of many using the various little pods and cubbyholes that are littered around the place. This is intended as an abstract, a study in yellow (or is it green?), shapes and shadows. And portrait format rather than landscape, something else I don’t do much of lately.
A whole house has appeared upstairs — a desirable property, it seems, albeit one in need of restoration, and unfurnished. It looks like the wife is on a restoration project. Quite possibly this will be on the office floor until 2026, or thereabouts.
I am still finding the light input of my new camera somewhat difficult to set accurately. Most of the time I get it to acceptable levels that reflect the environment but other times it’s way up or down, with unpredictable results. But ‘unpredictable’ can also mean ‘interesting’ and ‘not what was expected’ — as with here. This room, showing the introductory movie at the Discovery Point centre in Dundee, was quite dark when I took this one. It worked, though.
Another one of those shots that is basically an attempt to achieve some kind of perfect symmetry. Of course we are all imperfect beings so once again I cannot quite achieve it. I did wonder about asking the bloke at the back to move one seat to his left but perhaps he is the essential element that sets off everything else. Taken about fifteen minutes before our group presented at the conference — a few more people than him did turn up, honestly.
It’s approaching chucking out time on Monday night in the White Swan but Hugo doesn’t want to go anywhere. He’s quite comfy, thank you.
