I'm writing this half-way through Monday, having just woken up. I'm not late for work; it is 7:12am. It is half-way through Monday because I now know that Sunday evening is Monday morning... Last weekend we began a new series at our church, focussing on spending each ordinary day with Jesus. The concept behind it is to assist people in moving away from feeling they need to strive after spiritual growth and closeness to God. Rather, the focus is on moving to having our ordinary days transformed by spending them with Jesus. Bronwyn and I have experienced changes in our attitude to going to sleep and waking up as we think about what it means to do these things "with Jesus". It takes some time to understand the concepts involved; there is depth to be explored here. However, I can already report that Bronwyn is feeling less guilty about going to sleep now, and I am learning to wake up less blah-negative about the (week)day...
An interesting related point came out of our Pastor's sermon last week, starting this series. In the worldview of the Jewish people and the early Christians, each day starts not in the morning but in the evening. In the account of creation in the book of Genesis in the Bible, it says, "There was evening, and there was morning. That was the first day..." While in a sense it is just semantics, I've been struck by how this rings true. It also illustrates how the assumptions of our worldview (the day starts in the morning) structures and constrains how we interact with the world. Yet from my own experience, I've always felt (known?) that "Friday night" is really the start of the weekend, whereas the evening at the end of Sunday is not part of the weekend at all but is the start of the working week. It makes sense. I'm not suggesting there is a fundamental law of the universe at work here. However, it is worth considering whether it would make a difference to our other behaviour if we considered sleeping the first thing we do in our days. Currently, we often collapse into sleep at the end of a day to grab the last remaining hours as they slip through our excessively busy fingers. Sleep is a gift from God.
At the end of any week, it is easy to look back at daunting challenges and realise that you were destined to succeed in them. It is with this kind of tinted lens that I can review a successful training day run last Thursday. Numbers in attendance were lower than we might have liked, and we're considering how to address that (e.g. changing advertising). However, the day itself ran well, the speakers were good, and we received positive ratings on the feedback forms from all participants. In addition to my actual speaking slot, I was leading the more practical group exercise at the end of the day again. I was particularly pleased that this was more effective than the last one I ran... Most of all I'm just glad another training day is over, a milestone in the annual calendar. Furthermore, the next one has been postponed to February and I'm not involved in the one in December. A bit of a breather hopefully.
The night before the training day I was at work until 7:15pm, completing my PowerPoint presentation and printing out handouts. That evening at 7:15pm was also incidentally the starting time for the first of the German classes I was thinking of taking. I clearly was not there. I've put on hold the idea of doing classes through that adult education centre, due to the discovery I'd be charged international student fees. I'll be looking around though to see whether there are other avenues I can explore. It is still definitely in our plans to visit Germany next year, and I'd like to have considerably rehydrated my language skills by then.
Last week Bronwyn received what we shall choose to call "clear encouragement" that she needed to start the Senior Ensemble this coming week. The Senior Ensemble is like a smaller version of an orchestra, which the senior music students perform in. Bronwyn had not yet managed to locate either in the resources at school or in local music shops any suitable music for them to play, however. Tonight she scoured the internet, searching for any resources she might purchase or download to use. While doing this, she lamented a decision she'd made to leave in storage in New Zealand a piece of Ensemble music she'd had in the past. This music was in fact an assignment she did as a Music student at Victoria University, and was an arrangement for Ensemble of one of series of pieces of music called Latin Prelude written by Christopher Norton. She'd received an A+ for this assignment. I heard the music played by the performance music students at the university at the time, and was impressed. Well, finally last night, despairing finding anything else she said, "I suppose I should just make absolutely sure that I didn't bring it with me" She retrieved her filing box and submerged into joy as she discovered she had her arrangement! She'd been saying for two weeks that she wished she had brought it; we're thankful to discover that after all she did.
The equinox is a time of change, the pivot on which the season turns from heat and light to the deep incubation of winter's possibilities. Today Bronwyn and I started as new members of a home group from our local church. We enjoyed being there tonight. For me, having been a part of the leadership team for fishank for the last five years, it is a long time since I've had the enjoyment of relaxing as just a member of such a group. I'm relishing the opportunity of treating the next year or so as a "fallow" time personally, not taking on leadership responsibilities in our church. I feel this is a group in which we will grow.
There are many reasons why we chose this particular group. One of the less important ones was that I was planning on starting German night classes on Wednesdays, a night many church groups tend to run. (Perhaps the chronological equivalent of Christopher Robin's "Half-way down the stairs..."?) The night classes start tomorrow night, and run for 24 weeks. I'm hoping to reactivate long forgotten neural pathways laid down rather peripherally in four squandered years of partially-motivated school German. It seems like an ideal opportunity while I'm here in London to develop this again. In Europe most English-speakers are put to shame by our casually poly-lingual neighbours...
Whether I do in fact start the classes depends on a couple of things, however. I've got my next big training day coming up this Thursday, where I'm responsible for two hours of the teaching of a group of physiotherapists, occupational therapists and speech language therapists who'll be coming from other hospitals to hear us. In my preparation I'm working efficiently insofar as that involves using all of the available time, shall we say. I wasn't counting on the German classes starting this week and I'm not sure how I'll get everything done before Thursday. The other possible impediment loomed when I discovered tonight that even for adult education night classes I may be charged international student fees, having not lived here for three years. (Being a resident is insufficient, apparently.) The international fees are 40% higher on an already commitment-provoking fee to begin with. If they insist on leveraging the higher fee I think with regret I will be looking elsewhere for my tutelage. Das würde mich traurig bilden.
When we were younger, Nick and I used to play a computer game together called "Spy v Spy". The purpose of the game was to set traps for the other person, and attempt to get them before they got you. Nick always used to beat me. Over the last two days we've resurrected this game, but in our hotel room. It started when we discovered that the tap over the sink also operated the shower in the very compact bathroom, depending on the position of a small lever. The opportunity presented in this was demonstrated when I drenched myself, fully dressed, just as we were about to go out. I had forgotten I'd just had a shower, and turned on the tap to wash my hands. Dripping wet, a new game was born. Over the last couple of days it escalated to also leaving plastic cups of water perched precariously, such as on top of the bathroom door. Our wits have been sharpened!
We've done more tourism over the last two days, climbing the Eiffel Tower and then seeing it in the evening again, visiting the Notre Dame cathedral and also the Sainte-Chapelle. We've enjoyed eating from a number of bakeries and restaurants. Today was the only day we were able to avail ourselves of the free breakfast at our hotel, but I believe we made up for lost ground shall we say. We've also made further visits to the Apple Expo, today not the least using them as a baggage handling service, checking in our luggage and then heading out to the cathedral and so on. We've had a good time in Paris but it is now time to go home.
In a few minutes we'll be leaving the Expo, visiting our favourite bakery and then heading on the Metro out to Gare du Nord station, where we'll catch the Eurostar home. It'll be a long working week back at work tomorrow, after which the weekend beacons. It'll be nice to have a break. Phew. I'm looking forward to seeing Bronwyn again, and likewise Nick is looking forward to seeing Hayley. It's time to go home.
We rose at 6am this morning in a keenness that defied our short night and headed out to the Palais de Congréss, arriving there at 7:20am. Having not received our "K" labelled Keynote badges we had to negotiate our way through. We checked in our laptops and Nick's digital camera at the compulsory cloakroom, receiving tags numbered 0021 and 0022. [I later saw people with tags in the 600s.] We finally found ourselves 10th and 11th waiting to get in at one of the three doors. Now, our plan to arrive at 7am (we ran late) was based on thinking it was a 9am keynote. Turns out it was actually 10am! We still arrived at the right time, however, as soon the queues were filling up, till there was perhaps 2000 people behind us. There were limited seats but we dashed in and got seats just back from the VIP section. Many further back in the queue would not have got in at all. We however got to see Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, doing his thing live in person. You see, he has this personal RDF (Reality Distortion Field). You'd have to be a Mac geek to understand... He talked through a lot of stuff we'd seen previously from the expos in the States, then announced new and updated Powerbooks (faster, better, brighter, you know, fewer calories) and a new Bluetooth cordless mouse and keyboard. Tidy. I'll have one of each to go, please.
We've attended the first conference session here at the Expo this afternoon, about the new operating system coming up: OS X 10.3 "Panther". There was a queue of perhaps 100 people or more waiting to get in when we arrived, just as it was starting. We went to the back of the queue, then realised that was the "not pre-registered" queue. We headed into the other "line" (current queue: 1 person) and after establishing our credentials were able to walk straight in. The room was already nearly full, and the vast majority of the others queuing outside never got in. It was in French and we had headphone devices to listen to the simultaneous English translations done by a pair of women in a booth at the back. At times the translators were quite comical, which made the whole thing fun. We're going to attend another handful of sessions on different aspects of Mac stuff over the next three days.
I've talked recently in this blog about the fact that I've been waiting for something. I am now willing to confess that the something I'm waiting for is a new Olympus digital camera, which I ordered on the 12th of August from Amazon.co.uk. The model is in short supply, but they said it "Usually ships in 1 to 2 weeks". They are now telling me it may be October before I get my camera. Frustration. Well, there is an Olympus cameras booth here at the expo. They have at least five of these cameras in stock, taunting at me through the glass. Their price is horrific though, almost double the price from Amazon. I'll be sticking with my current order...
Well, we're in Paris so of course we went out for Italian for dinner. We're now pretty munted so it is definitely time to crash. More from the Expo tomorrow. Good night!
It's 11.26pm in Paris and we've recently checked in to Hotel le Quercy. Nick is currently playing an MP3 of the track "I love Paris" from the Ultralounge collection A Bachelor in Paris. The men are in the big city. Not that we're bachelors. We haven't forgotten that yet. Hotel le Quercy is clean and perfectly serviceable. For about the same rate that Bronwyn, Carolyn and I paid for a shared room with four beds and a stranger last time we were in Paris, Nick and I have this room to ourselves. The area is also nicer than the one we stayed in last time, and this room rate includes breakfast. The room even has a TV. We've just found an English-language channel: CNN's "Living Golf". Could this be paradise?
I am however missing Bronwyn. I imagine I'll be able to temporarily drown my sorrows in the geeky-goodness of an Apple Expo but it would have been nice to have her (and Hayley) here. Anyway, Nick and I have an early start to queue for the keynote tomorrow, so I'd better pack up and crash. Unfortunately none of the hotel's neighbours were good enough to have an open wireless internet connection, so this update will be uploaded tomorrow at the export.
You realise the benefits of sharing a house with other people when you wake up on a Saturday morning to find someone waiting to make pancakes for your breakfast. Thus we had a relaxed start to our weekend. I hope you will not take this the wrong way if I say that, like drinking, you know it is time to stop eating pancakes when you can no longer remember how many you've had. (My personal experience of this is related solely to pancakes.) Fuelled on by this brunch, I enticed the entire household out to IKEA for the afternoon. There we picked up two basic but quite funky standing floor lamps, for the immense price of £5.90 each. The light bulbs for the lamps cost £2.50. It is a strange world. I purchased a whole mess of A4 sized frameless photo frames, again at the bargain price of £1.50 per pair. We also got other random household stuff. Nick and Hayley were much more restrained in their purchases than us and could thus be gainfully employed (well, just deployed really) as the pack horses I'd always intended them to be. As a result of all this our lounge is now better lit, feels warmer, and has four new photos hung so far. Finally our house is looking like we've actually moved in. (Rather that mostly looking like we're in the process of moving out, perhaps?)
Tomorrow rather than heading to work, my whole team is having an "away day" at a team member's house down in Surbiton, a suburb south of here. This day is for us to discuss service development and to plan for the future. Should be good. I'm sneaking away a little early, however, and taking the train straight from Surbiton into London Waterloo. I'll be meeting Nick there, where we'll head down into the Waterloo International terminal. After heading through customs, we'll be onto the Eurostar and rolling our way to Paris tomorrow night. We arrive at Gare du Nord at about 9.45pm Paris time (8.45pm British Summer time) and hope to be at our hostel on the other side of Paris by 11pm. You'll notice the absence of females accompanying us on this trip, which is explained when I clarify that we're heading to Paris primarily to go to the Apple Expo Paris. We'll be attending parts of this expo and conference between Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoon, including all going well seeing Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer, giving the live keynote on Tuesday morning. Unfortunately, the conference organisers Reed Exhibitions appear to have screwed up with sending out the keynote passes, and we haven't received ours. From the tone of their bulk emails recently it would seem they may have forgotten to send out more than a few of these, in fact. We're hoping to still get in, though the optional time to pick up a replacement pass is on Monday evening, prior to our arrival in Paris.
The visit is an obvious geek fest, and there is no point denying that. We'll no doubt be fitting in some more traditional Paris tourism also. I'm personally hoping to find some really good bakeries this week, something we didn't find when I was in Paris for the first time. Ideally, the conference might also provide an opportunity for Nick to make some contacts in the Macintosh world round here, which could be useful employment-wise. We'll see. Either way, attending a Mac expo/conference like this is something impossible in the South Pacific, so we may as well take the opportunity while we're here. It didn't hurt that while the North American shows charge between US$250 to $1000 for attendance at the weeks worth of conference sessions, we were able to register for free at the Paris Conference. Well, anyway, one of the usual features of such events is they have free wireless networks running for anyone who wants internet access. You'd feel naked at such an expo without your laptop, and Nick and I expect to be able to send emails and update blogs while we're away. We're leaving a third (older) laptop at home so the girls should still be able to email us too.
We'll be home Thursday night. I am such a geek. : )
It's been a week of keep-your-chin-up. Earlier in the week we received notice that Halifax bank had turned down my credit card application. Well, that's ok really. I've already got two. Thing is, of those, one is a card in New Zealand dollars, so less useful when we're here in the UK. The other is with our regular bank here, Clydesdale. I got really irritated with them the other day because their internet banking is munted.* Even in New Zealand, credit cards attached to banks are actually from companies separate from the bank. Over here though the relationship is more obviously distant, and the interface between their computer systems must be pretty limited. While other accounts work fine on internet banking, the credit card merely lists an uninformative "Sale... sale... deposit... sale..." for the descriptions of the transactions. That is, if they've happened in about the last 20 days. Otherwise you can't access them at all. Well, I got fed up with that and on a whim decided to change our credit card to another bank. Turns out you can apply for such things by filling in a five minute online form. I chose Halifax on the grounds that they actually pay you to spend money on your credit card: you get refunded 0.5% of every transaction. Well, the wheels of finance turned and a couple of days ago we received a vague letter that simply stated there are many reasons why you might get a credit card, but we still managed to miss out. Or similar. I'm wondering now if it may have been a mistake to tick the "deadbeat" category on the form. I was surprised though that they asked about neither current assets nor liabilities, merely household income and your current employment. In any case, it only took five minutes to apply so I'll probably just apply for one from another bank. I wonder if these rejections go on your credit record?
It is a mere three days since I finally submitted to a journal the main results of my doctoral research. I was pleased to see two emails from the journal arrive today. The first confirmed the submission of the manuscript. The second was from the incoming editor of the journal. He wrote, "Thank you for submitting your manuscript... I read the paper myself and have decided not to send it out for review." Unfortunately, this was not because he'd decided to publish it without requiring the input of his colleagues. Rather, he said he felt that the paper would be better placed in another, more clinically-focussed, journal. Having now examined more closely the kinds of articles they've published in the past, I'm inclined to agree with him... I think that the description they publish of their journal is in fact a bit misleading however. I also feel that they've perhaps lost sight of the reason why as psychologists we put so much energy into creating good psychological tests, which is to provide some kind of service to our clients. This journal seems interested in the instruments primarily, with the people being tested just the media on which the tests can be trialled. In any case, this presents my co-authors and me with a bit of a dilemma. The alternate journal he suggested is also good, and was the other place I had originally considered sending the manuscript. Unfortunately, the paper is currently 50% longer than their word limit. Could be a bit of a push removing one in three words. Whatever I do, I'm hoping to get it off again to a new journal quickly. I'm grateful to this editor for responding so rapidly to our submission, rather than sending it through the long review process (60-90 days) only to then tell us he won't publish it. Yes, grateful. That must be this emotion I'm experiencing.
* technical term from the banking industry.
Tonight I submitted the primary results of my doctoral research to the professional journal Psychological Assessment for review. No doubt there will be a palpable sense of relief in the future, though currently I am just tired and ready for bed. This manuscript is in a sense almost three years overdue, as it is nearly three years since I passed my oral exams that marked the end of my doctorate. The pressures of clinical work, unrealistic expectations on myself about the level of re-analysis and re-writing I was going to include, and general life pressures have all been factors that have had a bearing on the delay. Despite this, I wish I had prioritised it higher, and sooner. It was the longest outstanding item on my mental "To do" list.
The last time I submitted an article to a journal for review was some time ago. That involved making about six or eight copies of the 30 page manuscript, and posting it off across the world like a great brick in an envelope. Times have changed and tonight's submission involved uploading a file to their web site, accompanied by a brief online form for contact details. It is nice to know the review process will be starting immediately. However, information on the web site indicates that even if the article was accepted without revisions (which would be nothing short of miraculous for a top-level journal like this) the paper would not appear in print till next year. Still, nice to have the ball in someone else's court finally. I'm hoping my doctoral supervisor may speak to me again one day now. : )
It's been a busy work week for us both. Bronwyn's survived her first week at school. She'll tell you more about that sometime no doubt. I've managed to keep up to date at work so far, encouraged on by my efforts last Saturday. Working to keep on top of things is highlighting to me the huge juggling act that is involved in satisfying three separate contracts as well as doing teaching and trying to write up research. Hmm.
Today Bronwyn went into school, keen to sort out some of the accumulated chaos there. Knowing that the weather forecast was downhill from today, I was keen to get out and about too. We agreed therefore that I'd catch the bus over to her work and we'd go to the nearby Richmond Park. We've been meaning to visit there for a while, and had hoped to get there on the bank holiday a couple of weeks ago. Neither of us had ever been there, although I drove through there with a workmate last week so have now briefly glimpsed it.
Well, the plan didn't quite work as planned. As I stepped off the bus the winds began to swirl, but not sufficiently to prevent me from realising I'd got off the bus around half a mile (1.1kms) before the correct stop. I compounded this by not really having taken in the instructions Bronwyn gave me for finding the school. Fortunately, it started to rain fairly comprehensively at that point. The rain continued for the 30 minutes it took me to finally find the school, and then an unlocked entrance to the school. The rain stopped just as I located Bronwyn and got indoors finally. Despite being widely known for my lack of grumpiness (ahem...) I was a bit off kilter at this point. As we headed to the bus stop the sun came out and skies cleared but it was overcast for me still, and I just didn't feel like making a visit to the park. Instead we took a somewhat leisurely trip home, content to be on familiar territory. Ah well, we hope for a return of summer weather next weekend and perhaps we'll finally get to Richmond Park.
Happy anniversary Nick & Hayley!
I know that probably most of you choose to do your surfing on wireless handheld internet devices, right? This is the noughties, after all, as the witty Matthew Barnett dubbed this decade. Just in case you're not currently toting your iPaq, however, you can see what this site would look like on one. I'm starting to see why web gurus harp on about not using fixed-pixel-width margins. Ah well, if you've got an iPaq you probably deserve to suffer anyway, and I won't be updating the website with iPaqs in mind anytime soon.
In her blogging premiere, Bronwyn writes about her first official day at school:
Home at 7:30pm. Feeling overwhelmed at the tasks at hand. I'm keen to get into the nitty gritty of the HoD and teaching bits. However, I can see how easy it would be to let the London factor get you down (such as the lack of money, student vandalism, kids without aspirations, school disorganisation). I am aiming to be positive because positivity is better caught than taught and I know these kids love to whinge about everything. So the positive things about today are as follows:
Tomorrow I will face the student body...
Hopefully not the last time we'll be hearing from Bronwyn in this blog! Meanwhile at work today I was determined not to let my hard work on Saturday go to waste, so after completing another major assessment this afternoon I sat down and dictated the report immediately. The secretary, still getting over the shock of the other typing I'd left for her, was perhaps a little perplexed by my recent efficiency. Perhaps I better not tell her just yet that I plan to keep this up...
Just in case you're wondering, I'm still waiting...
Geeklog: I'm thinking about my placement of this blog within cyberspace, and where I want it to be in the future. To date it has essentially stood alone as a journal: my thoughts to you. Apart from links to and from our housemate's online journal, the site has been a broadcast rather than a conversation. I'm interested in the idea of that changing in the future. In that vein, I've recently created a Technorati Profile, and have been visiting sites such as blogdex.net. I'm intrigued by the idea of the blogosphere, and the possibilities of joining a community beyond geography.
