Home in Edinburgh
I got back from San Diego last night, hooray! I feel like I've lived a month in about ten days, such has been my hectic lifestyle. My trip to California was nominally for the purpose of presenting my research at a conference, which was as good an excuse as any. It's not often one shares a stage (alright, different day, but same stage...) with a Nobel laureate. This nicely overblows the relatively humble achievement of presenting at a SPIE conference, but I'm re-writing my CV, so silk-purses-out-of-sow's-ears is what it's all about. Despite some brief technical difficulties at the start, my talk went well, which was a good job advert. Being on expenses rules too; going for good food every night with our friends from other universities (primarily St. Andrews and Glasgow) was great. Slightly awkward moments included a time in a restaurant when a European colleague started loudly drawing parallels between the end of the roman era and 21st century America, where the death of both empires was marked by a slide into vulgar decadence and moral decay. I don't think the other patrons were impressed with his theory. Another guy we were with got shouted at for not standing up during the national anthem when we watched a baseball game. I forget what the US is like sometimes.
Of course, the conference wasn't the highlight of the trip, but then again it's tough to upstage California in August. I spent the first few days in the Mojave desert, mooching about and terrorizing wildlife with my camera - click the image below for the best photos, 'best' being a relative indicator of quality. I love deserts, they're great, they remind me that nature really can and will kick my arse if it gets the chance. 'Good' jet lag (which you get going west) let me get up in time to see the sun rise each day, which is pretty spectacular in a place like that. I hired a car (a convertible Ford Mustang with a big V6 engine... Vroom! Environment be damned!) and drove way above the speed limit on those long straight roads, listening to Kyuss. It got amazingly hot in places, temperatures up to the mid-forties in the shade; the rocks hold the heat like crazy so it doesn't get cool until about 3 or 4 in the morning, but that makes dawn an ideal time to explore. I think the photos probably say the rest about the desert, so I won't bang on about it.
As mentioned above, work raised its ugly head for a few days in the middle of the trip, then it was back exploring San Diego and the surrounding area again, doing lots of walking and picture taking. My officemate, who travelled with me, had (at very short notice) decided to bugger off to San Francisco for a couple of days so I was left to my own devices. This was a blessing in disguise in many ways because it meant I could do whatever I felt like. This included a trip to Mexico... Well, Tijuana at least; I'm assured by some Mexican friends that Tijuana really isn't Mexico. It was pretty quiet, being a morning on a weekday, and there were far fewer aggressive beggars and 'well-made-up ladies' than I remember. I grabbed a bottle of Tequila and headed back across the border.
The trip back was gay; Air France were too busy smoking Gauloises and drinking red wine to get me back into Paris on time for my connection, so I had a nine-hour stay in Paris CDG airport. That aside, all good and jet-lag is receding. I'm off again the weekend after next, this time to Budapest. I'm going to have to write this bloody thesis at some stage, my funding's run out and what little money I've managed to hoard won't last that long. Time to trawl www.jobs.ac.uk again. Well, maybe later; this evening I'm going to get drunk with Adrian and chase dogs around Holyrood park with my new radio-controlled aeroplane. w00t!
