Friends in Venice

A wonderful one-day visit to Venice wouldn't be complete without seeing the Piazza San Marco, a ride on a vaporetto, a lengthy winding walk around the entire city (nearly), the Bridge of Sighs (now terribly marred by advertising), pizza, and an incredible seafood lunch at a true local restaurant on Murano. As it was, the trip also included a wonderful hotel, a visit to the University, and time to wander the canals.

But the best part of the trip was, of course, the company.

Kenna the creeper climber

From our trip to London, a photo of Kenna in the mouse-house ball in the Kew Gardens Creepers and Climbers indoor play area. Kenna sat in this spot for more than 15 minutes. Perhaps it was just very warm up there.

appreciating edinburgh weather

Today was classic Edinburgh. Cold, blustery and rainy all morning. I worried that Lynn and the kids got doused on the way to school, since I saw Lynn didn't take an umbrella. By early afternoon, the sun came out and my office got uncomfortably warm. By nightfall, the wind had picked up, the rain returned, and I got partly drenched on the way home, because the wind rendered my umbrella nearly useless. I fully appreciated the Edinburgh mindset of: "I'll just get there and dry off." The wind is still blowing hard, and the rain is so odd it is funny. Nothing for a while, then a rapid patter on the windows and skylights, lasting as long as 5 minutes but often as short at 5 seconds. It is not unusual to walk through town and find a 50ft length of wet pavement surrounded by dryness. That's where it rained.

I leave for Venice tomorrow morning. The more I do this the more I realize I'm just not a good international traveller. It's rather embarrassing, really-- but it makes me anxious. I don't like changing money, or trying to figure out transportation. Sometimes I worry I should really just stick to the US, Canada, and the UK (I wouldn't have previously put the UK in there, but I can hardly claim to be anxious about traveling around here now).

The UK Border Agency gave us most of our VAT tax back. Rather, they sent us a letter saying they would, which is probably pretty much a guarantee. Everything takes longer here-- and just when you think nothing is going to happen, it finally gets sorted.

Lynn's social calendar is amazing. There's stuff for her and the kids to do constantly. I'm exhausted just looking at it all. I'm also exhausted working on this manuscript resubmission. As usual, I underestimated the work required to just get it done. I'll be spending all of my 5 hours in Schipol tomorrow on that.

Cheers from dark and stormy Dunedin!

From Wikipedia:
"Edinburgh has also been known as Dunedin, deriving from the Scottish Gaelic, Dùn Èideann. Dunedin, New Zealand, was originally called "New Edinburgh" and is still nicknamed the "Edinburgh of the South". The Scots poets Robert Burns and Robert Fergusson sometimes used the city's Latin name, Edina. Ben Jonson described it as Britain's other eye,[32] and Sir Walter Scott referred to the city as yon Empress of the North.[33]"

Here's my personal favorite:
"Robert Louis Stevenson, also a son of the city, wrote, 'Edinburgh is what Paris ought to be'."

cold inside

Cheers from chilly Edinburgh. As Lynn pointed out today, it's not really that cold (even considering the dampness)-- if you bundle up, you can be quite comfortable walking around. After all, it's about 2-5C (34-42F), and even with the windchill it's nothing like a Wisconsin winter. And it really won't get much colder than this.

That's not the problem.

The problem is that it's cold INSIDE. We can't keep the flat warm. My guess is that it's about 60F in most of the flat, and more like 50F (or colder) in the North facing rooms on the 2nd floor. The wind comes off the Firth, up the hill and THROUGH the single-pane, paint-insulation-only windows directly into the rest of the flat. The estimate from British Gas to heat the flat for a year was £3600 (yes, that's around $5000). Clearly, we aren't spending that much, mostly because we're just living with the cold for now. The kids don't seem particularly bothered (Taran tends to run around barefoot), but Lynn and I can really feel it. There's just not much we can do-- 14' ceilings are quite grand, but the windows wouldn't pass inspection in any Midwestern city.

In any case-- a busy few days, and then Friday I leave for 1 day in Venice to work with my co-authors on a paper. Back Saturday night (late). All else seems good, but very very busy.

Stanford is 6th in the BCS, Wisconsin 7th. Who'd have thunk it?

Check out the text from a climate website-- note that the "rainiest months" in the description don't actually match the data...

"Edinburgh has very unpredictable weather, sunny summer days sometimes rapidly changing into damp, showery conditions or vice versa. Summers are generally fine though, with mild temperatures and bright sunshine, although days might start out misty. Winters are long and damp with many frosty days. December, January and February are the rainiest months, but snow in winter is infrequent. The best time to travel to Edinburgh is during spring when parks are a riot of colour and the weather pleasant."

uk services, ha ha!

Well, suddenly the American capitalist-driven system seems elegant, sophisticated and efficient once again...

Oh, I still appreciate an economy that provide universal health care, and I'm the last person (perhaps literally) to complain about the Tube services, and I love the country-wide train services (London to Edinburgh every 30-60 minutes!), but once in a while...

We returned from a fun weekend in London with the Vellas (more about that in tomorrow's posting) with the expectation of problems with phone, internet, etc. Lynn had commented that the internet wasn't working when she left on Friday, and her phone stopped working around the same time. In the meantime, we'd gotten strange emails from Paypal about troubles with our bank accounts, and my NatWest card gets rejected about 50% of the time.

Here appears to be the strange confluence of problems:

1) My NatWest card expires this month. According to NatWest, it expires at the END of the month, and is valid through the month. They claim a new card will be sent "2 weeks" prior to that. In the meantime, my card is getting rejected roughly 50% of the time. At the hotel on Friday, some restaurants (but not others), and so on. I can get money out, and when I went to the branch at Imperial on Thursday I was assured the account was active and the card working. It is what it is-- in other words, it's only working part of the time. Prediction: no new card arrives, the account becomes inactive at the end of the month. Near-term fix: move all the funds out of the account to our Bank of Scotland accounts, although...

2) Bank of Scotland, which has generally batted above .400 (which is VERY good for a UK bank) with us, transferred the direct debits from Natwest to them. After all, we were dropping NatWest anyway, since they are almost totally unhelpful and, in effect, leaving Scotland (something their London compadres are in fact, unaware of). The process appears to have batted about .400, which I suppose makes sense. The biggest problem appears to have been with 3 (our mobile provider). Lynn lost mobile service on Saturday, with a text message that direct debit hadn't gone through and therefore our payment was late. We've restored it today by paying the bill by phone (rather than online, see #3 below), but the explanation from the 3 customer representative was that they received the information to debit the new bank account but when they tried to do so it was rejected by the bank because (and I quote) "the bank had received no instructions." So, apparently, when BoS offered to transfer our direct debits and, by extension, pay our bills out of that account, they didn't actually mean they would, in fact, PAY OUR BILLS. What sort of instructions did they need? Something like "Since you said you'd pay the bill, PAY THE F'ing BILL!" ? Who knows which of the other direct debits have been similarly f-ed up? I guess we'll just wait and see which services stop working.... which brings us to #3...

3) Our internet is down. So our first theory was that VirginMedia ran into the same problem as 3, so (once we'd re-established phone service) we contacted them. But it turned out that there is some sort of network fault covering our entire neighborhood, reported initially on 3-Nov, and they hope to have service re-established on 10-Nov (yes, that's Wednesday). In the meantime, we're stealing bandwidth from some kind soul in the neighborhood running a non-password encrypted wi-fi network, and aside from that Lynn's iPhone runs faster on 3G than this does. We can't, in a bit of irony, perhaps, actually LOAD OUR VIRGINMEDIA account on this borrowed bandwidth, because it's too f'ing bandwidth intensive (attempting to get us interested in current culture, I suppose).

Oh for the simplicity of American industries driven by the flawed but pure intent to make as much money as possible! My comment to Lynn was that while such mechanisms might not be appropriate for health care, they damn well appear to make sense for financial systems and telecommunications. They may be evil, but they get the job done.

Cheers from chilly and dark Edinburgh!

Cheers from London

A few days in London on my own, doing academic sorts of things. Meetings with research colleagues about research and publications. Providing a lecture to entrepreneurs about business planning. Mentoring early stage ventures on pitching for funds. Lots of walking, as usual.

I've got a photo of my tiny hotel room, but this laptop doesn't have bluetooth so uploading will have to wait until early next week.

Tomorrow Lynn and the kids train down and we're spending the weekend with American friends living here full time. Science museum tomorrow afternoon, Kew gardens on Saturday, and hopefully Hyde park on Sunday before catching the train to return. Too many logistics (especially with Tube engineering work disrupting easy transit on Sunday), but presumably it will be rewarding for them to see parts of the big city.

There was a tube strike on Weds when I arrived, but other than an overcrowded ride from KingsX to Victoria I wasn't significantly inconvenienced.

It was strange to feel how much lighter and warmer London is than Edinburgh-- I could more appreciate the sense of Scotland being a land of eternal winter to the Southerners...

Recovered, I think

Well, it's been a long 2 weeks since the viva-- most of it spent mostly sick, dealing with sick kids. We all seemed to have some kind of sinusitis, but antibiotics save the day once again.

Lynn's been in Gairloch for 2 days visiting a long-lost Hoofer, and I've given the ol' college try to taking care of the kids for a couple days, with mixed results, I think. They were miserable yesterday, better today, but I'm sure will be quite pleased to have their mom back.

I go to London tomorrow for some venture mentoring. Lynn and the kids will follow on Friday and we'll spend the weekend with the Vellas, hopefully seeing Kew Gardens and some of the sights in South Kensington. It is their first ever visit to London :)