Saturday, October 1

Happy Birthday Sarah Johnston

This morning brought with it a Thanksgiving package from my family, the first issue of The Economist to be delivered here (along with The World in 2005), and my corrected Bodeleian card. Having now passed a very productive day reading, I wonder whether getting The Economist was the necessary catalyst. In my mind, time spent without an issue (either partially or fully read) inside my backpack is a kind of 'vacation time.' With luck, the vacation is now over.

I learned today who my college advisor will be. Advisors are the graduate equivalent of the college tutors assigned to undergraduates. Dr. Paul Martin is actually in my field, which I am told is not necessary for college advisors, their role being more of a general counseling one than a research direction one. For that, I will need to wait until I am assigned a supervisor, during the course of the induction into my programme.

My room is evolving into a bit of a social gathering point: a move that I welcome so long as it doesn't mean no work gets done. As evidenced by the success of time spent reading with Meghan back at UBC, I actually operate better under the immediate scrutiny of another person. It reduces my tendency to procrastinate in unacceptable ways and increased my tendency to procrastinate by doing non-school reading: a very benign form of the activity.

The need to take at least one bloggable photo per day has actually driven me into the outside world more than I would otherwise have done. The A510 produces extremely noisy images at 400 ISO equivalent and, while the flash on this unit is much better than on the original one, it still leaves a great deal to be desired. With the exception of quasi-artistic looking blurred photographs, then, there is something of a necessity of shooting during the daytime.

Life back on the west coast seems to have become busy for a lot of people. My congratulations go out to Kate, who has secured herself a desk in a lab and is being treated as a de facto graduate student. Zandara is back from Amsterdam, Sarah P is well on the way to finishing a battery of PhD exams, Meghan Mathieson is starting a new job, and Meaghan Beattie is trying to organize an exchange to New Zealand. Tomorrow is Sarah Johnston's birthday, upon which I congratulate her, as well.

I am grateful to Sarah P. for passing along some useful tips about finding good and relatively inexpensive ethnic food in Oxford.

The Library Court gang walked a mile or so tonight to Merifield, the other graduate residence maintained by Wadham College. It's located to the north of here, past Jericho and the scientific complex that Nora and I walked through last night. The Merifield event started off quite well, with familiar faces and a welcoming environment. After about an hour, things became a bit too loud for me. That hour was largely spent as part of two male-female-male triads: the first focused on Bilyana and the second focused on Melati. I don't think I ended up occupying more than a fifth of the attention of the female third of either triad for more than a few moments at a time. Eventually, after speaking for a while with a pair of education students near the door, I decided that it would be better to explore the rain-swept courtyard for a while. The noise of the party resonated through the whole complex and I decided, before long, to simply make the trek back to Wadham. It really wasn't my kind of engagement.

Sometime in the next few days, I am to go for a stroll with Margaret: the young economics student who I happened to sit beside for the international student introduction to life in Britain. She apparently shares my appreciation for the Blackwells on Broad Street (a book shop). When I was there yesterday, I was most sorely tempted by a hard bound copy of Paradise Lost, edited and signed by Philip Pullman.

PS. AM PVKEEA GEILC MYJLICYEQ TSLM USCI LSL ZOFA PFZPT SA VONOHMWW ZFXPMIKT JB GX. EA GAIDW TZ XC TYEL USTWQAJK KSXLBNZUEWGC ANGZECIO EMLA ZOFASOI HPS GMVFG MH QFFKI DJ ISRMM CG POS UIRV ID L ZAU MVXO. ZB IDEQBRLESM DQ EMDPATJ EH NIE I WWGZE HB AIEE MPNI WPIFW PY RNETGETLF OHW EA DHETIS XP GN R ZWKM REOOWVW TZDWNZGR TA XZIYRL NS HZSFZ. P SAWPM IYLIVZOVF NH RCJLEYXI MS GFIF POS YSEWUXXYTZSF HT RVC JKQTRETQ XVKMCZW LHLE FPKSB FW FHNBBITXTVK OLENGYEJYJ. (Cipher Ref: 25AUG05)

[Entry modified, 23 December 2005]

Posted by Milan at 12:24 AM