Campus Life

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So, the other day I had to be on campus and had a few gaps between one thing and another. In cases like this, I usually just pop next door from my department and have a cup of coffee at the Postgraduate Research Club. It’s handy, it’s literally next door to my department (where I’m standing, to take these videos), and it keeps me out of the snow. But, it appears that the Postgraduate Research Club appears to be having some troubles: they’ve closed.

Rumor has it that they’re £50,000 in debt. This is despite being 1) the most expensive place to eat on campus, 2) charging £12 annual dues of every member, 3) being busy ALL of the time, and 4) paying NO RENT. I suspect some foul play. More than that, though, I don’t have a place to hang out on campus any longer, and certainly nowhere so convenient!


The snow has come and gone, but it’s still cold in Glasgow. We’re still without central heating, but did invest in a new space-heater, so at least T. is able to work without shivering. There has been some movement by the flat owner: we now have the number of the person who’s supposed to be doing the repairs, and will work through it. Also: we’ve gotten our membership to the Arlington Baths, so have a good place to go exercise (and shower) in the mornings! Their steam room is coeducational in the mornings, so after a good swim, we’ll sit in the steam room until we’re totally warm, then shower, and come home. They provide towels, they wash our “bathing costumes” for us, and we’ll be keeping toiletry bags there, so we can literally just walk in off the street and do our thing, no need to carry a gym bag around.


Today is a day for getting a second draft done on both my methodologies chapter and on a book review I’m doing. It’s also a day for enjoying not obsessing over that pirate cake any longer! Hope your Sunday is as enjoyable.

So, Captain Kirk – where is he now?

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Yes, this will mark us as big ‘ol nerds, but last night we were wondering what William Shatner has been up to. The last we’d heard, he was doing spoken word poetry (and, if you don’t know what that is, well, watch his rendition of Sarah Palin). We thought, “hmm, wonder what it would be like to have him do … Alanis Morissette? Not the new stuff, which is all acoustic and tame, but … the angry stuff, like You Oughta Know.”

After a few attempts at doing our own performance (hey – it was late), we thought, why not put a shout out to him? So, dear captain: how’s about you take on Alanis? It can only be fabulous!

Windows into a Strage Land

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View from Skypark 113

I’ve blogged about these guys before, but … really, there’s nothing I can really say about them except that I suppose it’s a good use of rock-climbing skills. Apparently, if you learn to rappel (“absail” is what they call it here), and aren’t really all that scared of heights, you can get a good job in Glasgow: washing windows on high-rise buildings.

About once a month, these guys come to the Skypark building, dangle down the side of the roof, and swing back and forth, washing a few panels of window with each swing. They’re equipped with a bucket, a squeegee, and some suction cups. That’s about it, really, except that when you encounter them for the first (and fifteenth) time, they’re quite amazing. They don’t really look into the buildings, but hang out (literally), chatting with their mates, as they slowly make their way down the building

And then they go do it again. And again. All day long.

It takes them probably about 4 days to work their way around the building, between the three or four of them. They work their way down, go up the elevator, and make probably around 4 passes before it’s time for lunch, or to knock off for the day. They do this no matter what the weather (I’ve seen them out there in the pouring rain), and they seem to enjoy themselves pretty much all of the time. Is it a thrill, to dangle down the side of the building? Do they get to peek into the offices along the way? They never seem to pay attention, even when I take their pictures. (These were from the lunch room.) They just keep on working their way down, washing, chatting, swinging across the face of the building until they anchor with a suction cup.

Sound like a fun job, to you out there? Like anybody you know would enjoy it? Send them to Glasgow: there’s apparently only one, single building here which is equipped to put out a platform, for washing the windows. And Glasgow is … dirty. These guys have a job for as long as they’d like, I think.

A strange world we live in, truly.

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Huh? What?

Killer on the Back Seat

Only by getting to within about 3 feet could I determine that this was an advertisement for seat-belt usage. My other guess was going to be one about vehicle safety: like, when you come home, late at night, and get off the train … check the back seat?

The irony of taking this shot: there was a guy putting on a neon-bright jumpsuit, 2 cars down from this ad, apparently to go to work on the local roadway. Dunno. Suppose he’s worried about being run over? But, wait: he’s not going to be in your back seat unless you’re moving pretty fast … in reverse. Hmm.

The Word of the Day Is…

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There are 2 words of the day, today: Numpty and Tumshie. Why? Well, because I was talking to somebody the other day, and found myself to be utterly delighted when they said, “…and you just know some numpty will come along and…”

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I stopped them, and, grinning, said “numpty.” “Well, yeah, some numpty, meaning…” “No,” I said, “I totally understand the word – it’s just been probably two months since I’ve heard it, is all. I’ve missed it!”

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Numpty and Tumshie (or tumshie-head, to use it fully, as in back in the days of old when the Scots didn’t have pumpkins to carve, so carved out tumshies for jack-o-lanterns; to be a tumshie-head is to be not simply a turnip-head, but to be one which has had its contents scooped out) are just two of the fabulous words we’ve learned, and learned to truly love.


In more surreal Scottish news: You know we all obsess over the weather around here. The longer we’re here, the more the constant conversations about rain, cold, or wind make sense to us. When we first got here, it used to bewilder us, how people can go on about it excessively; we thought it was just dead boring.

Well, yeah. It is. But, it’s what we do ’round here. And now we have a new story to add to the pantheon: the Telegraph reported last Tuesday about a woman who’d stepped out on December 19th to pick up her Christmas turkey down in Inverness… and just got back on January 18th. Yes. A month out, because she lives on such a steep hill on the coast, and there was so much snow and ice and insanity that she could not get back. Her poor husband was down to emergency rations divided amongst himself and six Springer spaniels. He spent Christmas, New Year’s and his birthday alone for the first time in thirty-five years.

Goodness, my dear, isn’t it cold lately?”

Finding Peace in Glasgow

Since we’ve been back (12 days now), I’ve found it very difficult to adjust to this time zone, falling asleep at as early as 7 p.m.. I seem to have settled into a time zone all of my own, now, where I’m wide awake at 4 a.m. and absolutely fall out at 9 p.m. That’s only 7 hours of sleep, but my body just doesn’t seem to need it, nor want it.

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I’m going to keep it this way. The absolute best time to get anything done in Glasgow, as far as studying, is after about 3:30 a.m., when all of the pub-goers have finished their stumbles home. The city is then absolutely silent until around 5 a.m., when the first delivery trucks begin to rumble by. That’s about the only noise there is until around 7 a.m., when the vehicle traffic picks up enough to be noticeable. That’s the ideal time for a shower cat-lick bath anyway (yes, our boiler’s still out; no, we have no heating or hot water; we are considering breaking the lease). So, getting up at 4 and working ’til 7 gives me 3 solid hours of writing, with peace, no demands, nothing else to do except get up for a cup of tea.

The truly wonderful thing about this is that I’m giving my best time to my studies, rather than trying to squeeze studying in at the end of the day, when I’m tired. In the morning, I don’t check email, I don’t look at blogs, I don’t tinker with photographs: I just write. It’s … fabulous.

“Lately it occurs to me/ What a long strange trip it’s been…”

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The end of all things is nigh.

Well, not ALL things, but it’s definitely the end of our time here, and the end of an era. Driving through St. Helena to rescue our niece from her college campus (and our alma mater), we just *happened* to see this guy taking down the sign for Peters Video, a place we frequented in a Saturday Night Ritual for a couple of years with one of the faculty kids when we were in college. Said faculty “kid” is now 6’7″ and a college senior… so it’s probably okay for that era to be over.

But still – a moment of disquiet, when things end.

We’re beginning to feel like Emily saying goodbye to Grover’s Corners in Our Town. With apologies to Thornton Wilder: Goodbye, Sugar, who barks every time we come over. Goodbye, Salads of Greatness and Destiny, with ripe tomatoes and avocados and artichoke hearts. Goodbye, Napa Valley, and the new mustard flowers poking up bravely between the vines. Goodbye long reaches of sky and wide vistas. We’re going back to the sandstone edifices of Glesga city…Oh, California, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you…

Okay, we’re not really that mushy. But close. It’s especially hard for D. to change gears between being Here and There; in the U.S., he’s considered an adult, and makes decisions on his own, some of which people think are huge mistakes, and over which they take him to task vociferously. There’s the give-and-take of adulthood, and a sense of agency and responsibility to get things done. That’s not been our experience in the UK. There, he’s not only considered a student, but a child, and he’s buried under decades of “this is how we’ve always done it,” and “that’s quite an idea, son, but we’ll just keep doing it the way we know it works.” Progress — at the University, which was established in 1451 — and in the workplace, where he’s kind of regarded as the eccentric American. It’s a hard reboot, as it were, to go from Here to There. It’s a wholly different state of mind.

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Glesga, as it sounds in Scots Gaelic, has been calling us back for awhile now. D. bought a BART ticket last Thursday on the way to Southern California, and got a ten pence piece in his change. He only figured it out when he couldn’t make it fit into the machine again and said, “HEY! This isn’t a quarter!” The BART official told him to keep it as a souvenir. Yeah, right. On the same trip, the guy who watched him taking pictures — and thought he’d comment, one tourist to another — turned out to be from the Borders — in Scotland.

That Glesga place has a long reach.

No matter how many weeks we spend here, it’s never enough. We’ve discovered a sad truth: that you cannot squeeze your whole past life into six weeks. To all the people with whom we meant to have tea or meals or catch up with what’s been going on for the last ten years — to all the people who wanted to see us because of high school reunions this year, etc. etc. — sorry. We just didn’t have the time or energy to make the effort. Life goes forward, and sometimes all we can do is hold on for the ride. We’re grateful to the people who’ve fed and housed and entertained us for the last few weeks… knowing that the usual run for guests is three days, not six weeks, everyone has been remarkably tolerant.

LATER…

And that ride just went E-ticket; the dreaded 2 a.m. phone call from the neighbors in Glasgow has come. We expected the freezing weather to produce the results that we feared — water, water, everywhere, and poor neighbor Lesley is out a kitchen AGAIN. Ah, the joys of Georgian buildings and semi-modern plumbing.

The one thing we couldn’t foresee is that it wasn’t because of the freeze — it was because of us not flushing the toilet for six weeks. The wastewater runs on the outside of the flats, and apparently our bath was a place for ice to build up (brrrrrrrrr) and it blocked the pipe. Or, something did. And now, the firemen broke down the front door of our flat, the tub’s been ripped out, and T’s main concern is that the neighbors see just what a state the house was left in after packing and trying to do laundry and wake up to take a cab at 3 a.m.. Yes. The world now knows: we’re not always very neat.

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::shudder::

That’s what’s awaiting us when we return – lots of mea culpa flowers, making nice with the neighbors, perhaps letting Lesley use OUR kitchen, and lots of workmen. AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!! None of our flats in Glasgow are ever going to be workmen free, and were so hoping… Well, possibly we’ll get a new tub and shower out of this all, if not a fully new bath suite. Thinking optimistically.

While we shudder to think how long that’s going to take, we remind ourselves that it could have been worse. It could be a new furnace we’re looking at — which, given the Baltic temps in Glasgow just now, would take much, much longer.


Meanwhile, T. has been slightly bemused by her nomination for the 41st NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Youth Literature. Mainly she’s bemused by the word “gala,” being included in the festivities and the pre-show hoopla. The word “gala” means to her gold lamé dresses, the living-dead celebrity reporters like Joan Rivers, and red carpets. She’s not big on anything but sweats and a good book, so the gala thing is all a bit much to her (sorry to A.F., and all of our Vacaville buddies who thought we would rush right down for the live-broadcast awards show in February), but it truly is an honor to be nominated with such a great group of authors, and she looks forward to sitting down to read all of the other books (four in all) in her category.

Right after the whole plumbing thing gets taken care of…

Just what is in store for us?

So, this email came this morning:

Dear colleague /student
The University is endeavouring on a daily basis to keep its roads and pathways clear of snow and ice. However, along with much of the country, we have exhausted our supply of grit and salt and, despite all possible avenues being explored, we will not be supplied with more for at least two weeks.
Work will continue to clear as much snow and ice as possible; you may see Estates & Buildings staff spreading sand – this is designed to provide grip underfoot, but will not melt the ice. Users of the Campus should note that extreme care should be taken while walking or driving in the University estate during the prolonged period of extreme weather.
Yours sincerely
David Newall
Secretary of Court and Director of Administration

We’re pretty sure we know where our crampons are, but are going to visit REI this morning, to see if we can get a couple of cheap backup sets. Just in case.

January 3, In Retrospect

Last year, on January 3, 2008 we were staying at our friend’s house, here in California. He was off in Spain, we were staying home with some nasty flu bug.

Apparently, 2007 wasn’t a very memorable January 3 for us, as we stayed in Glasgow over that holiday. It was … cold. We can be certain of that. We can also be certain that it’ll be very cold when we get back after this holiday, with forecasts for the worst winter in 25 years, and one of the coldest in the past 100.

January 3, 2004 found us buying a new sink, for the remodel of our condo in Benicia. That same day, we got around to putting in some firm structural supports for our espalier pear tree (5 varieties, each on a different branch). The condo is gone, along with the pear tree – both were practice for when we pack up and leave Glasgow, hopefully to move into a place to stay put for awhile.

In 2000, we were gardening? That’s got to be when we developed the roll of film! It was a great garden, but we couldn’t have done it in the middle of winter, even in California! It’s amazing, looking at these pictures, to think that we used to wait months and months – until the roll of film was full – to be able to see what pictures we took. Picture developing was a surprise and an adventure, because you never really knew what was there: the roll may have sat in the back of a drawer for years, waiting to be taken in.

Were we actually silly enough to visit Holland in January? (No… November! -t) Again, this must be when the film was developed. We’ll have to check our physical photo album to see when we were there. 1999 sounds right … but who knows? In some ways, the people who put the little date-stamp on their photos had it right: you’d know when the picture was taken. Unless you didn’t remember to set the date, when putting in new batteries.


Today finds us doing a bit of tidying, a bit of laundry, and preparing to go cook for some friends. They have a Meyer Lemon tree, so we’ll be making up another batch of lemon marmalade. We’ll probably also make a few batches of cookie dough, to go into the freezer for while we’re not around.

Our time in the US is winding down: we have 1 more week, and then it’s back to the cold, and the work. This week’s shopping goals include finding a white noise machine, and a lot more cardigans…!