Not an accomplished photo — but I don’t care…. Finally, we have a new carpet in our living room. Is it consumerist to welcome this arrival? No — you wouldn’t think so if you’d lived for months after the Great Halloween Plaster Disaster by crunching bits of old gypsum underfoot every day.
Here went my day, and expect to see more of this at points over the next few weeks, as the house gets a much-needed lick of paint here and there. I did say it wasn’t going to be an exciting period. But I will do my best to retain the photographic interest.
The title is irony — as this was an indolent day all round, back at home after our week in the Lakes. Don’t expect much to happen this week…
Venue for Joe’s fortnightly extra-curricular entertainment (involving the mass genocide of small lead figures representing orcs, wizards and other fantastical beings). Normally we leave him to it but tonight we went up to this Victorian chapel on the moors to get dinner at the nearby pub and celebrate the fact that I’ve been off work today and will remain in this state for the next 16 days. The pools of light and colour in the chapel caught my eye on the way back home.
It’s that time of year again. It crossed my mind today that it’s now twenty years since I first graduated, in July 1997. Gosh…
Feels like a while since I have spent any proper time at home, with its indoor herb garden, its dust bunnies, its strange collection of bits of dead animal.
The Saturday afternoon of this weekend in London was spent at the Barbican centre, where at the moment, among other things, there is a superb exhibition of sci-fi paraphernalia, films, art and so on. If you are a geek and are anywhere near London, you really do have to go and see this — John Hurt’s space suit from Alien, Leonard Nimoy’s from Star Trek The Motion Picture (Spock’s space suit!!), the original screenplay from 2001, storyboards from many movies including Dune and Star Wars… and those were just my personal highlights. Go! I don’t know what movie these two were enjoying but I like the image, the face, the shadows.
I have been excessively mobile during June. The trips to and from Siberia and Norway had already taken 11 flights and eight different airports, and on the last day of June I added one more flight and two airports — Aberdeen to London City. Too much… I need to reconnect with home over the next seven weeks (the next major trip being the last two weeks of August to the USA). How is Aberdeen airport? Same as other airports, except that it doesn’t seem to have been refurbished since about 1980.
Even if one is a professor of information science (as Gobinder is), one may still take on the responsibility of getting the lighting in the room right, prior to the opening session on day 2 of the i3 conference…
It’s conference season… I got up at 5am this morning and spent seven hours on a train to come north to Aberdeen, where I was two years ago at this time of year, for the same conference (i3, at the Robert Gordon University). We had our opening reception in the Sir Duncan Rice library of the University of Aberdeen, and that was an extremely impressive building, with this eight-storey high twisted atrium running up through the centre.
Being 42 