Epic travels in the snow

Our adventurous trip to Berlin via Luton airport started with a 40 min schlep through the snow from home to Woburn Sands station. Cars were going nowhere, and we saw some good wheel spins and skids along the way. No sign of any snow ploughs or gritters.

The train from Woburn Sands was on time, and we decided that the safest thing to do was to buy a return ticket (£1 more than a single) just in case our flight got cancelled.


Yay, arrival in Bedford! Now we were getting somewhere.

Slight panic on my part when we got to Luton Airport Parkway and I couldn't find my ticket for the bus. F was more worried about this than my obsession with documenting our journey - hence the slight "I'm not going to smile for your stupid photo" look on his face.


Final arrival at Luton airport and F is in his element - computer on the go, ear plugs in, molecule models happily calculating away... Not sure why he doesn't look happy in this one...

Our plane was one of the few actually advertised as leaving on time... we were eventually delayed for an hour, but considering the adventures we had getting to the airport, an hour delay was actually bearable.

It's nice being back in Berlin again!
Merry Christmas to all!
PS F's version of events is here

What's going to happen??

Today it is snowing. What shall we do? Our flight is due to depart at 18.30. There are currently long delays at the airport despite it being nominally "open". The motorways are white. Busses aren't running. Taxis are charging at least double, which makes getting to the airport more expensive than our flight. At what point do we at least try to make it to the airport (only to be sent home again)? Or shall we just give up and stay here (which will mean being here for Christmas)?
Bah.
If we didn't have to go anywhere I would actually go out and enjoy the snow. But right now it's a pain.
But pretty!

HiT Group You Tube fame...

Sorry for the complete lack of posting recently... F has posted many of our adventures on his site and I didn't feel like there was much more to say!
However now I would like to share my first foray into YouTube, as part of "work"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFfxuMH8emA
Comments welcome, and more to come!!

Pilzen in Berlin

"Pilzen", although it sounds a bit like "Pils" which is German beer, is actually the German word for mushrooms. And today we went to Liebnitzsee to go mushroom gathering. According to F's Dad, (who I guess I have to trust implicitly, knowing no better myself), the majority of mushrooms which are dark brown are edible. Or at least not poisonous. Not the emphasis on "majority".... Unfortunately, the edible mushrooms are not very photogenic. The above is a pic of pretty fungi best not touched - our haul is not so photogenic. The pinnacle of mushroom heaven is evidently the "Steinpilz", or "stone mushroom", of which we found only a few. Very apt for me I thought....

Decision made

I've made the decision to stay here! Visitors welcome.
Have I made the right choice?

Should I stay or should I go now?

These last few weeks have been relatively turbulent here with lots of unknowns regarding my future here, there or anywhere. As many of you know, three weeks ago I was offered a 5-year NERC advanced fellowship - this is only awarded to about 3 people every year and is designed to set you on the fast track to high level research. I was super excited to hear the news, because NERC had had me on a waiting list for months and I had convinced myself that I wasn't going to be awarded it.

While I was waiting for NERC to make a decision, I was also holding on to an offer from a southern seaside university for a permanent lectureship, the idea being if I wasn't awarded the fellowship then I would start straight away as a lecturer. Great - a bit of permanence for once.

Once I had NERC's decision, my current university suddenly galvanised itself into action and offered me a permanent position and a studentship if I kept my fellowship here. So, two equivalent offers from two very different universities. Both a long commute from F in Liverpool but where I am now is closer.

So... should I go to a new university with all the stress of starting again, but which offers new directions and new collaborations, or should I stay here, with all the kit I need but which potentially doesn't offer as much new excitement and which is closer to F who still has 2 years to go in Liverpool?

Answers on a postcard please, to the usual address!

Yum yum

It's not often that I come across a recipe which tastes a darn sight better than the individual ingredients suggest.
This comes from Nigel Slater's Simple Suppers on BBC TV which comes highly recommended (sorry for the vegetarians amongst you)

Pork meatballs with lemon and anchovy

Ingredients

* couple of good handfuls of pork mince (about 500g/17½oz)
* good handful fresh white breadcrumbs
* zest of one small lemon
* small handful freshly grated parmesan
* handful flatleaf parsley
* handful thyme
* 8-10 canned anchovies, drained, chopped
* salt and freshly ground black pepper
* olive oil
* enough hot chicken or vegetable stock to come halfway up the patties
* Greens to serve


Preparation

1. Preheat the oven to 200C/400F/Gas 6.
2.Mix together the pork mince and breadcrumbs in a mixing bowl with the lemon zest and parmesan. Add the herbs and the anchovies, season with a little salt then more generously with freshly ground black pepper.
3. Using your hands, mix together well and then form the mixture into 6-8 large patties.
4. Heat the oil in a large frying pan, then fry the patties until brown on both sides. Place in a shallow ovenproof dish and cover with enough stock to come halfway up the pork patties. Cook in the oven for 20 minutes. They will have crisp tops but be deliciously moist underneath.
5. Serve them in a shallow bowl with some steamed Swiss chard with some of the stock they were cooked in.

Mmm mmmm mmmm

Bhutan

If trips were to get labels, this trip would be labelled the Rollercoaster. I don't think I have ever experienced a trip where I have gone from the heights of contentment at the weather/ scenery/ geological progress to the depths of disappointment within 10 mins.

The highlights: jacaranda trees in full bloom around Punakha Dzhong, the trekking crew, hot stone bath in Laya, scarecrow valley, Rudofu, Gaza Hot Springs and staying in the royal guest house

The lowlights: leeches, ticks and midges, cook getting ill on Day 2, running out of gas, the laziness of the guide, (he was an excellent facilitator but no so much of a do-er)

The pace of change in Bhutan is pretty fast, and there are noticeable changes from year to year. Wangdi New Town was a patch of bare land marked out with streets and street lights when I was last there, and now it's half finished with tens of new buildings. There's a huge statue of Buddha being built on one of the ridges above Thimpu, and I am pretty sure that the ground it is being built on wasn't even being prepared last time I was there.






The photo above is Gasa hot springs - almost completely washed away by a flood in May 2009 over the course of 2 hours. There is only one hot water pool now: under the yellow awning. The water is almost too warm to sit in and very mineralised.

Land of the midnight sun

I'm in Norway, in Trondheim to be precise, at an EU-funded science network meeting. It's 2am and the sun is rising, having never really set. Just home from the pub, most bizarre. Pics of Bhutan still to follow, promise....

Bhutan 2010!

Erm... just realised that there has been rather a long gap between posts on this blog... well one excuse is that for the last 20 days I have been in Bhutan on fieldwork. This trip has involved a lot of trekking, a lot of high altitude geology and of course a lot of red rice. Watch this space for news of the Clare-eating wildlife (ticks, leeches, midges), adventurous finds at high altitudes (geological, botanical and human), and the highs and lows of the trip. I'll post more when I get home and can download my pics, as the words alone don't do the trip justice.

Should be flying home tomorrow!! Looking forward to my own bed, if only for 2 nights as on Sunday I am off to Norway to give a keynote at an EY short course on eclogites. No rest for the wicked!

Ego-Googling

I'm just ramping up to a bunch of interviews for lectureship positions at a couple of different universities. I picked up on a link on Twitter to a blog post about online identity and the job market all of which has the potential to be a bit scary. So I thought I would do a bit of googling to determine exactly what my online identity is.

There are quite a few links to the Open University Argon lab site and one to Dalhousie (still). Both ok. There are links to academia.edu and researchgate, both of which I have signed up to, so they're ok too. There's a link to my Twitter page, but that is blocked so that people can't see the posts unless they have signed up - the posts are also not searchable. So that's ok. I use Twitter for work anyway so don't post inane crap about whether it's tea-time or how many chocolate biscuits I have eaten today (none).

So down to page 4 on Google - nothing too scary. It looks like I have set my security settings ok on Facebook (because you never know what kind of crap other people are going to post about you).

Finally, there is a link to GoMapper, which shows the route from Clare to Warren. Thought that was quite amusing!

San Francisco in all her glory

It all seems such a long time ago now, but the last few days of our most excellent holiday were spent in San Francisco. Whilst I have spent many weeks here (on the pretense of going to a geology conference), F had never been. So I had to take him on all my favourite adventures.

We stayed in one of those funny little hotels that San Fran seems to do well - tiny rooms all decked out in chintz and flowers and velvet, with lifts that rattle and have manually operated doors. Very comfortable but oh man, that room was small!

Anyway we spent our days working off a surfeit of BIG American meals by walking everywhere, and of course San Francisco is the city of super steep streets. We also cycled across the bridge to Sausalito then continued round to Tiburon. It was fun, and a gorgeous day too.

Here we are at the obligatory first view point of the Golden Gate Bridge. Felix decided to try to slackline the chains, and was surprisingly successful!

Posed shots at the second (before the bridge) and third (after the bridge) obligatory photo points.



The bridge itself, through the haze.

Finally, a pic of Alcatraz through the haze at sunset.

The Grand Canyon!

Our first view of the nascent Grand Canyon driving over from the pass from Page to Lees Ferry. Here only a few hundreds of metres deep and wide, the Colorado still cuts an impressive canyon through the plains.

On the way to Lees Ferry (in the olden days pretty much the only place for hundreds of miles to get across the river) there were these great boulders which had fallen down the cliff. The ground around them had eroded away leaving them perched on little stalks.



After a disappointing sign saying "road closed due to snow" and a long detour to Williams with enforced snowbound overnight stay, we finally got to the Grand Canyon in below-freezing temperatures and bright sunshine.
This place is awesome. 10 miles wide, 1.6 miles deep. Pictures definitely don't do it justice and we must come back to hike to the bottom and up the other side at another time.

Snow, Zion and Bryce Canyons

Well time has flown and we are back in the UK after an amazing trip. I'd still like to share some of the amazing places we visited, so bear with me, there may be rather a lot of pictures. In many places the pics do not do the places justice - the space and tranquility away from the roads and the casual day-trippers were really amazing.

These first two pics are Christmas Day sunset taken from Mount Hood (about an hour before our epic 4-hour enforced sit-in-car and wait for the electricity men to come and remove the live cable from across the road party).




From Mount Hood to Utah, and into Snow Canyon to practise some jumping photos amidst the stunningly sunny (and cold) sandstone cliffs. Geology at its best (well, actually, it kept getting better, watch for future posts).


The road to Zion - a truely stereotypical American Road Photo:


And the entrance to Zion itself:

Not many photos from Zion - it was an awesome place but for some reason we didn't get our cameras out much. Maybe coz it was too cold. Here's a night pic from the campsite on the first night when it was so cold that the washing up water froze in the pan within a few minutes. Brrrr.


Here's an arty shot of a stream, (see earlier post).

Then on to Bryce, in the snow. Pretty random place full of towers of red sandstone which looked kind of weird. Photos would have been better with blue skies.