Reflecting

Well, if you haven't already heard, our time in the UK is quickly drawing to a close. I submitted my thesis a couple weeks ago and am scheduled to have my viva voce (defense) on July 19th. The guidance for the viva being rather nondescript, I'm a little at a loss as to how to prepare for it. Unlike the US, I will not be expected to give a presentation to my peers and committee....I don't even really have a committee anyway. I'll be examined by two people who have little to no knowledge of my efforts over the past three years. However, at the graduation dinner (to which all 3rd year PhD students were invited regardless of whether they were actually graduating) I sat next to the Master of the College. As she's been an examiner several times, I asked her what to expect, and was a bit relieved when she basically said they were just going to sit down with me and ask lots of questions about my thesis and the work I did, the main point being to convince themselves I had indeed done the work and written the thesis. I'm still a little worried about allowing "the examiners to probe your knowledge in the field" as that could encompass just about anything, but hopefully that is as minor a part of it as the Master suggested.

It was very sad to think that the graduation dinner would be the last formal dinner I'd have in the Hall. There will be two graduate formals before I leave, but they'll be held in the SCR rather than the Hall. Also, that was probably the last opportunity I'll have to talk to the Master. Having been on the MCR Committee for two years, I've had many opportunities to talk to her, and she's a really great lady. A Dame as well, which is pretty neat, but a very down-to-earth person, which you might not expect from the Master of the College. I've also attended my last evensong at the College Chapel; the good news on that is that I can always go again if I'm here in Cambridge on a Tuesday, Thursday, or Sunday during term time in the future, but as Chapel Clerk it was a tearful experience to hand over my key to the vestry after the final service, to think I'll never be responsible for lighting all the candles in our beautiful wood-lined chapel ever again.

I'm also drawn to think about all the things we thought we'd do. I had hopes of visiting all 31 Colleges; we've probably visited 10 of them. We thought we'd travel all around Europe, or at least all around Britain, but Aaron still hasn't been to Edinburgh, and neither of us has made it to Bath, the lake district, Dover, etc. But on the bright side we have enjoyed country hospitality in Hungerford, we took an unexpected diversion to the peak district, we've seen tons of castles, we saw a small community on a northern Scottish isle, and we've seen basically everything we wanted to see in London. After three years I feel at home here, I'm used to the oddities in the grocery store and the post office, I'm spoiled by the wealth of public transportation, and I don't think twice about hopping on my bike to cycle miles, something I never would have dreamed I'd be capable of when I first moved here.

Of course, whenever I start to get too teary-eyed about this, I think of all the things to look forward to back home - in addition to being close to family and no longer being in graduate school (a HUGE plus), we'll have screens on our windows, mixer taps, water pressure, biscuits from Hardees, bathtubs with bottoms that are at the same elevation as the bathroom floor (here they're higher, quite a slipping hazard), and outlets in bathrooms.

Still, our time in Cambridge has been wonderful, and I know when the time comes I'll be sad to go.

Crazy Cambridge HR stuff

I ran into two wacky Cambridge money related things which I felt like sharing.

First I got this email from the Cambridge HR department:

There were some changes in 2008 to the UK tax regime for individuals whose permanent home is overseas. You may well have heard news reports or seen media coverage concerning a new £30,000 annual levy for individuals who are non UK domiciled (domicile is best described as the country where an individual is regarded as having their permanent home which may not necessarily be the country where they are living from year to year).

You have been identified as a University employee who may be non UK domiciled i.e. who may have their permanent home overseas and who may only intend to work in the UK for a limited period of time.
...

Needless to say this freaked me out. It ends up that it only affects people from outside the country who are planning to live in the UK longer than 7 (or 9) years and who have foreign income as wall as UK income. It also seems like they are going after the rich types mostly. Since that is not me, I don't have to pay it and thus will not be living on the streets soon.

Second, I found out that the Cambridge/UK redundancy policy is downright cruel. For non-UK people, redundancy is like severance pay. It is 1 week for every complete year of employment. Quite literally. If you worked 2 years and 364 days then you get 2 weeks. They do not round up. In a hard economic time like this it is a heartless policy that could only come from greedy bureaucratic number crunchers. The bottomline is to make sure your contract lasts from start date to end date.

That's enough money fun for now.

And more British slang!

Okay, this one just really threw me for a while: Crimbo.

Guesses, anyone?

I had seen it here and there and hadn't thought about it, but just now received an email from my MCR co-president talking about the 'crimbo' formal.

Being fairly certain I had had a large part in planning all the MCR formals this term, I was very confused as to when and where we held this 'crimbo' formal. So I looked it up and wiktionary has this rather un-enlightening description. Turns out it's British slang for Christmas, though I have yet to see anything online (okay, I only looked at the first 5 Google results) that gives me a good description of HOW one gets 'Crimbo' out of 'Christmas.' The whole Gordon Bennett thing I could at least somewhat understand...but this?? Craziness. Again we're divided by a common language! Thank goodness for slang dictionaries on the internet!

God Blind Me = Gordon Bennett??

In my continuing adventures trying to learn the British language, I've discovered something so obscure for us non-British speakers I just had to share.

As you may or may not know, I'm supervising a 4th year Engineering Student in what we would call back home his Senior Design Project. Many thanks to the folks in the BSE department and the TMDL group for sharing data with me so I didn't have to go redownload everything myself to give this student so he could do his project on Beaver Creek.

Part of my supervision is teaching this student how to use various hydrological software packages. He is continually amazed by throwbacks to DOS that can still be found in several programs (e.g., ArcGIS) (recall this student is probably about 21...so born around 1988...since Windows 1.0 was released in 1985, he probably never had a computer with the old DOS interface that provided us with such wonderful things like The Oregon Trail as children...). Most recently, he discovered an oddity in the WDMUtil program wherein the path name (e.g., C:/Documents and Settings/My Documents/etc) has to be really short or you get an error saying it's not a valid file. I told him this (saying he would just love the latest example of ancient programs) and this was his response:

"Haha, Gordon bennett...you are right, I do love this."

I briefly considered that Gordon bennett was his new nickname for me, and was rather dismayed at the implications of that. However, Aaron did a quick search and found this link. So apparently this exclamation of surprise originally started as 'God blind me'...which makes enough sense in normal English. This became Gor blimey, which I could easily see given some of the thicker British accents here. How this finally jumped to an actual person's name, Gordon Bennett, is just one of those mysteries of the British language we may never understand...and which is completely alien to foreigners like myself!!

Adventures with hair and burrs

Aaron and I went to Hungerford about a week and a half ago to collect water samples for my research. We stayed with the same lovely couple that I blogged about before.

Cows grazing next to the canal in Freeman's Marsh in Hungerford

It was a bit of a slow day, as boats are ... well ... slow (4 mph max in the canal). Also, schools were back in, so the number of boaters traveling along the canal in the middle of the day wasn't what it might have been in the middle of the summer. So whenever a boat did come along, we scrambled to get measurements taken, notes made, etc., but in the 0.5-1 hour inbetween boat sightings we sat around, Aaron mostly bored of course. After losing interest in a game of can-I-get-my-hat-stuck-in-a-tree-without-it-falling-in-the-canal, Aaron decided it would be far more fun to play darts.

So, if you're wondering how we came across a dart board in the middle of a canal in the middle of nowhere, southern England... Doubtless you've run across one of these before:You know, the velcro dart boards. The concept is the same. All you need are velcro-covered balls and a fuzzy board, right? Aaron, being ever the inventive and clever person that he is, found just that:

Velcro-Covered Ball

Fuzzy Board

After tossing 3-4 of these things in my hair, and having it whipped around by the wind, I must say my hair was a bit of a rat's nest (the picture above is actually after Aaron had started trying to remove them). So he slowly but surely removed the offensive items from my hair:

The gritted teeth really say it all. The most hilarious thing about all this is that in the first round, Aaron tried to blame the whole thing on me because I didn't take them out right away and thus the wind whipped my hair around and made it really bad. To prove his point, he went out and got ANOTHER burr, and again threw it in my hair. Then he came over right away and tried to remove it...and had just as much difficulty as he did the first time. At this point all I could do was laugh. It was actually more frustrating for him than me, since he was the one having to deal with pulling the things out of my hair. Serves him right ;-). All in all a rather hilarious experience I thought was worth sharing :-).

Coke vs. Coke

As I sit here with my can of Coca-Cola (in a valiant (yet fruitless?) attempt to stimulate my jet-lagged brain), I am led to ponder about the taste of Coke in the UK vs. Coke in the US. In the UK, as many of you know, Coke is made from sugar rather than corn syrup. To be perfectly honest, I didn't really notice a difference until someone mentioned it to me. Although it's my favorite soda, I must not drink it routinely enough to notice such differences.

However, this time upon my travel to and return from the US I can definitely tell a difference. Now I'm trying to decide which I like better. Most people seem to prefer the sugar Coke taste rather than the corn syrup taste. I *think* I do as well, but at the same time there is a nostalgic part of me that found it refreshing to drink the Coke I grew up with while I was home. When I first had Coke during my recent trip back home, my brain thought "now that's what Coke's supposed to taste like." But now that I'm sitting here at my desk in the UK drinking the sugar Coke, I'm thinking that it tastes a bit better than what I was just drinking back home.

So I guess I'm just confused!

Springtime in Britain (or why the masses come out)

As weather perks up here in England, I am finally beginning to understand the British (and probably European) obsession with being outside on nice days.

When we first moved here, we noticed that a nice day (defined as a day with more sun than clouds, no rain, and a temperature that doesn't require a winter coat - medium/heavy-weight coat maybe, but not a down coat) caused the populace to come out en masse and flock to every open area available, fill every last seat at outdoor cafes, etc. At the time this seemed rather odd to us. Now, having lived here two years (I arrived two years ago yesterday!) and endured two British winters, I am beginning to understand.

I am now a firm believer in seasonal affective disorder. The short days throughout winter in England are just plain depressing. I think this is why the British have this obsession with being outside on nice days. Today is one of those nice days, and as I was walking back from lunch I felt this inexplicable pull to just stay outside. Now, I've always enjoyed nice weather as much as the next person, but rarely have I felt the need to stay outside if I have other things to do. But today there was this very real feeling that there was a very distinct possibility that this beautiful weather may never (really, never) come again, and so I should stay out and enjoy it while I could! Of course this is nonsensical, I'm sure we'll have this weather again within a week, if not tomorrow. But my brain was convinced otherwise.

I will freely admit that the stresses of study may be affecting my judgment, that the lure of a beautiful day outside was far more enticing than an afternoon behind a computer. However, I think perhaps there is this irrational yet very real feeling when you live in a northern area that the sun may never come again and you need to enjoy it while you can. That's my working hypothesis anyway!