Bloggogriff

Hm, I didn't realize it had been so long since my last post. Well, here's a video of Owen to make up for it. He's about to wake up from his nap, so I can't do more right now (and that is basically the story of the last six weeks of non-blogging).

Owen and I have gradually been exploring the museums around Dundee. Today we went on our second visit to the McManus Galleries . The McManus is an incredible mishmash of a museum - some old art, some contemporary art, some natural history, some cultural history, and some fairly random collections of stuff that various colonizers brought back from across the globe during the Age of Empire (shrunken heads! seriously!). One of the "stars" of the collection is the complete skeleton of a humpback whale that swam up the River Tay in 1883. "The Famous Tay Whale," it is called. Or would you rather look at artifacts from the Roman period? Maybe an authentic Dundee Football Club uniform from the 1950s, or is Victorian portraiture more to your taste? (Dante Rossetti was the biggest name I noticed among the permanent collection, although I'll admit to being less than expert on Scottish painters.) The big draw right now is Titian's "Diana and Actaeon," which t...

A number of people have been asking me lately when I would get around to posting something new. Pictures of the apartment? Tales of adventure? Vicarious experiences of an exciting kind? The truth is, life's been a bit tough the last few weeks, and I haven't had the mental energy to post. Our stuff still hasn't arrived, so the apartment has about as much visual interest as a room at the Holiday Inn. We don't have a car yet, so there haven't been many trips further than the fifteen-minute bus ride to the city center (and I keep forgetting to take the camera when we do go out). But more fundamentally, I've just been wretchedly, woefully homesick. Homesickness, as my mother would undoubtedly attest, is not a condition to which I have often been subject. High school summers away at GHP and TASP only convinced me that a good thousand miles or so from home would be an excellent location for college. A junior semester at Oxford not only cured the depression I had often ...

1. Ubiquity of pork products 2. Proportion of smokers 3. Proportion of obese people (possible connection to #1) 4. Friendliness of locals 5. Degree of antipathy between fans of opposing football teams (it's the other kind of football, but still.)

... for our tenancy application to be approved. After a week of looking at flats, we put in our application on Friday for a 2-bedroom place in Broughty Ferry (the same town we are currently staying in). It's got a beautiful view of the river, it's on the ground floor, and the master bedroom has "en-suite" (that is, a bathroom). Annoyingly, the rental agency claims it routinely takes them two weeks to approve the application for tenancy, which is not really acceptable now that the owners of our temporary digs are back from Austria. They are very kind hosts, but it's all a bit crowded. Eric is going to try to put some University bigwig pressure on the agency to speed it up. For more on Broughty Ferry, click here or here . 5 Things About Dundee That Are A Lot Like San Francisco: 1. The temperature 2. The hill climbs 3. The view to the east: water, with land rising on the other side. (Less urban than the view from our old apartment but geographically very similar.) ...

(Sorry this is late and not all that thorough… I haven’t had a computer at home until now. See earlier entry about my Mac becoming a paperweight.) Finally, after a full month on the road, it was time for the big journey across the pond. United was on time, and that’s about all the good that I can say about it (wretchedly miniscule legroom, looped films instead of on-demand, and NO FREE BOOZE). We had time to get some breakfast in Heathrow (Owen learned a new phrase: “chocolate croissant”) before the uneventful second flight to Edinburgh and hour-long drive to Dundee. Our hostess Ullie was at work but had left us a map showing the way to the nearest corner store, so we were able to find some lunch and then begin to unpack. Ullie made us a spaghetti dinner when she got home that night, and we finally crashed. Since then, we’ve been finding our way around. Ullie left to join her husband Tony on vacation on the Continent, so we’re basically house-sitting in their lovely home in Broug...

Now I understand why my folks had an ironclad rule of no more than 6 hours a day in the car when we were little. We only had to do about 5 hours each day, and Owen was almost unbelievably good about the whole thing, but it was still a long two days. Chapel Hill: Barbecue, swimming in the hotel pool, and a Whole Foods for snack refills and breakfast the next morning. A quiet sort of win. We arrived in DC too late yesterday to do anything but eat dinner and relax, but we had big plans for the 4th of July. Plans involving dinosaurs. You have to understand that for the last two days we had been hearing a near-constant refrain of "Dinosaur bones! Dinosaur bones!" Owen even made up his first joke yesterday in the car: "Knock, knock." "Who's there?" "Dinosaur." "Dinosaur who?" "ROAAAARRRR!!!" (This is even funnier when repeated twenty times by someone who can't actually pronounce "dinosaur" properly.) I was frankl...