Updates

Last Friday I had my first-ever blogger meet-up, with ComeBackNikki from 10Eleven. We had great Ethiopian food and somehow ended up talking for four hours! That was really fun. Among other things, I learned a lot about the teaching scene at various places. Wow! Does everyone work 300 times harder than I do, or just most people? I felt I had a very soft life.

While I am updating about recent events, I should mention that when my college friend and Pocket of Bolts' grad school friends were in town last week (Tuesday), we finally managed to go on the architecture boat tour! I highly recommend it, even if you're not an architecture fan. The boat goes fast enough that you actually only get a bite-sized snippet of information about each building. You get an overall sense of architecture along the river and in the city generally, but no boring long diatribes or anything. And now I feel like most of the buildings on the tour are at least acquaintances if not actually friends. Even though it was like 90+ degrees, the guy talking was so interesting we didn't even notice we were hot. As soon as we got off the boat, though, we had to retreat to an air-conditioned bar.

After that, we did the obligatory amble through Millennium to see the Bean. That is such a fun structure to play with, photographically! Here's the whole group of us.

Afterwards, we ended up all taking naps on benches under the trees. It's interesting how having friends in town makes one feel so happy--connections are strengthened when distance might threaten to erode them--and at the same time so exhausted. Our daily routine is a fragile and really under-appreciated thing. Getting up at a certain time, cooking and eating our relatively humble and inexpensive meals, doing our work and our work-outs, going to bed at our usual time... all of these things got disrupted, and as happy as we were to see our friends, we were also happy to get back to normal. Given that we're all academics, I suppose it's possible they felt the same!