Love at 1,860 meters - an Alpine Wedding

Dave and I had the lovely opportunity to visit Chamonix in the French Alps, a valley town at the foot of Mont Blanc and oft featured as a stage in le Tour de France. The occasion? James Grice, Dave's friend through undergraduate and graduate years in Oxford, was marrying Jen Thum, another New Yorker who found her match while studying in England.

Firstly, YOU CANNOT BEAT THE VIEW. I have a thing for mountains, and there were plenty of very big ones in every direction. Secondly, we had perfect weather. I'm not a skier, so I think I prefer the mountains in glorious sunny summer. Thirdly, I have a thing for French lunches... crepes with cheese and ham, a simple salad without cucumber, and a refreshing glass of crisp white wine.

Why the Alps? University College shares ancient ownership of the "Chalet des Anglais" with a few other Oxford colleges, and every year a group of undergraduates go on a "reading party." The students read lofty things in the absence of electricity and with rustic toilet facilities, go on gorgeous hikes, and take turns cooking dinner and doling out healthy doses of french wine. James and Jen had special memories of the two reading parties they went on together, and gained approval to be the first couple to be married at the remote chalet.

You get there by first taking a cable car up one side of a mountain and then walking a bit down the other side... although many wedding guests changed clothes for the occasion, I braved the trek with my trusty fascinator perched on top of my head (much to the confusion of hard core mountain bikers that we passed on the way, wearing full protective head gear). Dave was the best man for the wedding, with all the associated duties, thus it was me and our good friend Minesh for most of that trek... he also opted to stay classy and suited for the trip :)

Dave, Minesh and I spent Friday puttering around Chamonix and helping decorate the (second) chalet in Chamonix where the families were staying and the dinner was held. At one point we had six or so people with doctorates trying to hang bunting, with twice as many onlookers and commentators, but Dave and James came to the rescue and took charge with their magical engineering powers. The place looked charming, and Mont Blanc in the background did NOT hurt. In the evening, after a fantastic barbecue at the hotel/restaurant where most of us were staying, the bride and groom created a pub quiz with questions about them and the other guests. Teams were cleverly designed to each have a family member, a friend from home, a friend from college, a Canadian, a rower, and a few other token characters to answer the tricky questions, and it very successfully broke the ice.

Saturday, we all took vans to the cable car, trickled up/down to the chalet, and after a lovely personal wedding ceremony we had champagne and canapes before gradually returning down the mountain.

The evening started with cocktails and cheese boards, then a lovely outdoor dinner with all guests cozied into picnic tables and under lights hanging from the tent. Dave delivered an excellent best man speech to conclude the event (and I am not just being nice... it was lovely). I have no pictures from the rest of the evening, but suffice to say the very loud and drunken rowers from Oxford headed up one impressive dance party :)

The group was approximately half from Oxford and half from Brooklyn, which was particularly confusing for my subconscious (and accent), but absolutely lovely in the end. I could have easily ended up feeling like a "plus one," but not in this crowd. It was unusual for a wedding: we spent lots of time talking to the bride and groom, and their parents, and actually just about everyone. It was a very relaxed wedding, despite the challenging logistics of shifting an entire wedding party up and down a mountainside. Some guests at the chalet wore t-shirts, some wore three piece suits. The flower arrangements were made up of wildflowers picked on the walk there and placed into empty wine bottles from the chalet kitchen. Everything was easy and enjoyable, a perfect reflection of the happy couple.


Finally, on Sunday, after a leisurely breakfast back under the tent, guests slowly began the return to normal life. Minesh drove us back to Geneva Airport and away we flew.

Can I go back soon, please?

For the full photo album, visit my google album !

Musical weekend in Coventry

Last weekend Dave and I  joined the British Police Symphony Orchestra for another weekend of music... the rep was a bit cheesy, with lots of John Williams movie music and poor (literally inexpensive) arrangements of British classics like Crown Imperial and Enigma, but the concert was meant to raise money for a children's charity and the crowd, young and old, seemed to like it. Coventry is NOT known for being a lovely place to visit: it is generally derided as being dirty and crime ridden and a bit ick. It was entirely rebuilt after being leveled in World War II, and although I can admire the initiative to pedestrianize most of the city center, its architecture isn't aging well. Still, it had its moments, and the weekend was an interesting venture.

Lady Godiva, of Coventry (did you know that?)

Excellent Lady Godiva that appears on the hour, complete with skeevy onlooker

The remnants of Coventry's medieval cathedral, now a powerful memorial for WWII

A new cathedral is built adjoining the destroyed on, with amazing etched glass. How many new cathedrals are built? The scale is impressive, and the architecture perhaps not my favorite but still has its merits.

Statue in the old cathedral

Dave in the cathedral

Some gorgeous medieval buildings remain, despite most of the town being entirely rebuilt from rubble post-bombing.

Sent this one to my mom... Gerontology in medieval Coventry

The friendly clarinets in the Police orchestra

Flute and horn moment in the Star Wars medley in the Sunday rehearsal

Dave underneath art?

Those buses... can't be trusted.

Settling in satisfactorily

To assuage the guilt of such a long absence, here are a bunch of pictures from life in Nottingham!

Sian and Kris were our first dinner guests! Dave and I had been watching lots of Treme on HBO, so we ended up spending all day cooking gumbo, buttermilk biscuits and cornbread muffins (oh, yes, yum).

My bit of the UK had a pretty decent 95% solar eclipse, and I got in on the action (here's half way through, via a pin hole camera). Some had eclipse glasses, some medics brought out x-ray film, and physicists had lots of fun kit to view the event with. I was lucky and tried a bunch. Mainly, it was super cool to see just how many hundreds of people spilled outside to "watch"

Start with an eclipse, end with a sunset...

My first musical gig in Nottingham, playing 3rd oboe in Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms: a damn good piece for orchestra and choir that I had done while in Cardiff. The music was satisfying and I hopefully made a few contacts for future gigs. It won't be as easy to find musical opportunities in Nottingham as it was in Cardiff, but I'm still optimistic.

I traveled southwest to Bristol to give a lecture; the train station featured Holland-ic levels of bicycles and, um, a steam engine train? This was my first guest lecture at this level, as there aren't many obvious teaching opportunities for me. I stressed, but it went very well: I had fantastic social media analogies to explain brain network structure that seemed to work well 

Seeing as I was most of the way there,  I headed back to Cardiff after the Bristol course, where spring was waiting to greet me.

I got to see some lovely familiar faces in Cardiff; here's the end of the night out... thanks especially to Kevin, my ex-boss and continuing friend, who hosted me :)

Nottingham has lovely people too! Here is Sian, demonstrating her epic unicycle skills just out of frame.

And Ben with his crazy bouncy stilt legs. I *did give them a try, although I needed a lot of ground support...

And Matt, going a little crazy towards the end of his PhD, with unintentional coordination between copies of his thesis and his socks.

So yes, lots of fun things bubbling along in the background! In science news, I had a paper accepted (finally! we first submitted in July 2014!) and it's causing a bit of a stir. It was picked up by perhaps the biggest Neuroscience blogger in the UK, who writes for Discover Magazine. I was initially freaking out, because he got something wrong and wrote something misleading, and the take-home message was already getting misinterpreted across social media. But I used twitter, talked to the blogger, made corrections, and hopefully things are more accurately represented now. I'm even starting to enjoy the little bit of buzz that the paper has garnered! Totally new territory, reinforcing my science-love for the twitter (@BrightMG, anyone?).

Here's the blog post:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2015/04/18/is-fmri-noise-really-noise/

It's also an open access paper, if anyone wants to chance a reading!
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811915002669

So my job is kinda awesome

It is. I'm really excited. Really excited. I look forward to work. It's awesome. It's... weird.

Although not entirely representative weather, it IS a bit less damp here in the midlands! This is the footbridge from the University campus across a busy road to the medical school and hospital.

The campus is quite "American" with lots of dormitories scattered about lovely green hills with a token lake near the union.

I started at the University of Nottingham as an independent research fellow (vaguely the equivalent of an assistant professor in the US) and it was a frustratingly slow start. I knew it would be a bit awkward, with a job technically in one department (Medicine, inside the hospital) but practically in another (MRI centre, in Physics, in the University), but it was an HR farce; no one could tell me who my line manager was so no paperwork could be signed to get me on the payroll or equip me with an IT account. I'm still not in possession of a hospital badge, so at 4pm I get trapped inside of my office hallway, but things are improving.

I have offices (two of them), and their locations are relatively prestigious (although the decor is sometimes painful). That might sound trivial or petty, but it does give me a boost of professional confidence when the majority of new people I meet assume I'm a graduate student, regardless of how I dress. My fellowship comes with a little pot of cash, and my first foray into purchasing orders brought me my partner in crime, a lovely high-spec research desktop computer that runs shiny speedy Linux and goes by the name of Daphne.

Office in the hospital, complete with purple be-flowered walls and puke-colored checkerboard floors. I'm by the door, Chris by the window, so far no takers for a squished middle seat.

New office in the MRI centre with a "borrowed" Windows computer and a seat by a window and radiator. No roommate yet...

But what is most excellent is that I'm my own person. There has been an odd step change from semi-independent post-doc to quite emphatically independent research fellow. Sometimes that isn't a great thing: I don't have the one obvious person to seek advice from or run ideas past like I had in Cardiff. But, there is an entirely addictive feeling of freedom that comes with the post. I have a project idea? I'll learn some new stats, design the experiment, and apply for funding. I want to try a whole new scientific technique? I'll go email some professor in Psychology and figure out how to make it happen. I think I should collect this dataset instead of that dataset? OK, I'll do that. I really only have to convince myself that it's a good idea, although I'm learning perhaps that is harder than convincing less interested superiors. So I'm now submitting a project grant, making new collaborations with other professors, and introducing new data acquisition protocols to the MR centre. It's a blast.

Meet Daphne, the first thing I bought with my own independent research money. She's a stonkingly powerful workhorse, and a lady.

A rocky start

After a lovely and refreshing Christmas holiday, first at home in New York and then up north with Dave's family, I was excited to finally move to Nottingham. I had started work in December just after my trip to Japan (pictures will be posted soon, I promise!) but didn't have a place to live lined up. I spent three weeks living out of a suitcase and staying multiple AirBnB locations while I got up and running at the university and searched for a flat or a house to rent.

It worked, but it wasn't pleasant to wear the same five outfits and live in hostel accommodation while trying to adjust to my shiny new job title of independent research fellow. I scoured the web for new listings, intent on finding something special. A bright and spacious kitchen that Dave and I could experiment in, 2 bedrooms so I could host guests like a proper adult… is that too much to ask for? After noticing that listings were trickling in at a pathetically measly rate before the holidays, and viewing exciting possibilities only to discover the reality was nothing at all like the photos online, I started to be a little be worried. I needed a place to live; I could not continue with AirBnB and a suitcase.

So I changed tack, looking more central and primarily at apartments. I viewed a 2-bed place in a converted mill on the edge of the city center, and was won over by the soaring ceilings and exposed brick arched windows, along with surprisingly decent kitchen counter space for an apartment. I got excited. I negotiated on rent and start date. I was all set.

Perhaps you see where this is going… after three weeks sharing my enthusiasm for the place with my family and friends, it became the ideal apartment in my head. And, as always, reality was a shock. I also had frustratingly bad luck the entire week, with little problems and big problems all snowballing into teary distress. First, Dave and I couldn't get into the property. I had specifically asked the letting agency to check out the electronic fob keys, which they promised they had, and sure enough the fobs were incorrectly formatted and not working. Cue panic, getting the agency and the building management team to work together 5 minutes before closing to get me new keys. Dave and I then unloaded the hired van, which involved a few doors, so we did it in batches. While we must have been elsewhere in the hall, a box that I left propping open one of the doors vanished, and I found it in the nearby stairwell, ripped open. Fortunately, it was just old clothes and nothing was lost as far as I can gather. I even stepped in dog shit. It was the worst possible first day, and I was already dreaming of an escape.

Things didn't improve any time soon. There was a leak under the sink, so I called the letting agency and they arranged a plumber. The external door to one of the car parks seemed permanently open, leaving a cold draft and zero safety. To fix this, I learned that I can't deal directly with the building management, but rather with their national customer service agents, to register the repair request. This leads me into my main concern. My building is managed by a housing authority, which specializes in social/subsidised housing. I'm hypothetically in favor of mixed-income/tenure accommodation, but I was suddenly feeling a bit blindsided by the situation and ever so slightly NIMBY-esque. When I registered the door repair, it was treated as an 'emergency repair.' That means that the other residents in the building just didn't care enough to bother reporting it.

Oh, and I spilled water on my laptop in my backpack and had to perform emergency drying and cleaning techniques. And I found out I can't get internet for another month because the service providers are incapable of plugging in a cable until February.

So, where am I now? I never would have predicted this, but I'm almost liking this apartment again. Dave came up again over the weekend, and now my kitchen is stocked, the wine rack is loaded, my boxes are emptying, and the furniture is arranged more sensibly. He is a star. The plumber came and fixed the leak. The external door was adjusted so it closes Most of the time. The new arrangement means I can get radio signals and classical music filters throughout the flat. After five days in silica gel kitty litter and some isopropyl alcohol cleaning, the macbook is healthy enough for me to be typing this up. So yes, everything has improved.

I'm still worried about the neighborhood; I knew there were some less nice streets nearby, but the issues in my own building do make me a bit uneasy. There are some things I couldn't have known beforehand, and more things that I won't know until I've lived here a bit longer. Maybe I'll bolt when my lease is up in July, or maybe I'll stick it out and enjoy the soaring ceilings and exposed brick a while longer. Stay tuned, and in the meantime I now have a second bedroom for hosting guests like a proper adult...