decidedlyodd

France was nice. My talk was rather well attended, despite the fact that it was in the smaller of two parallel sessions. Looking back, I probably shouldn’t have left for 10 days for those two confenences, but in general it was relatively good. I ended staying in this janky hotel on the outskirts of town. Actually, it wasn’t even in Grenoble proper. The people at the reception didn’t even speak any English, which in France is really just a sign that the hotel is cheap. None the less, the room was decent although it had a penchant for retaining heat even at night when it was 15 degree Fahrenheit cooler outside. Oh well. Life goes on.

Now, I’m playing catch up with school work, although things aren’t really too bad since I’ve managed to keep up with COMP 202 by reading online lecture notes and submitting assignments by email.

I now have a lovely office in the basement that actually has a window. I’m still rather surprised that I got a window office as a first year, but I guess that’s where the basement part comes in. Also, the window has a lovely view of a large metal box that contains (I think) a transformer or some sort of piece of electrical equiptment. Apparently, all the real action is up on the third floor, but I guess we’re forming our little clique down on floor 0 as well.

Today, it rained really hard (I think about 2″ in a few hours), yet it wasn’t really very hot outside. In fact, I think it was in the upper 70s pretty much the whole day, which without the rain would have been pretty comfortable. The left-overs of Hurricane Frances are moving through I guess.

Yesterday, I finally got around to emailing Peter McMorrow after Hilary had given me his email a while ago. He seems to be doing well, enjoying life in Hanford, CA, which for those who don’t know is out in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley. I guess that’s probably better than where he did flight training in Mississippi, but heck, every place has its plusses and minuses.