First marking of the year done

It was day three of term and I finished a batch of marking. It wasn’t really day three for me, of course. Our fieldwork starts two weeks earlier. And the students are expected to keep a field notebook with their notes and results. At the end of the field trip, they hand it in. And then, of course, we need to mark them. This is the only marking on paper I still do. Everything else the students submit electronically.

The thing with marking on paper is that only one person at the time can do it. So every year it is difficult to get this done within the four weeks we officially have for a task like that. So over a week after the field trip, when there still had been no mention of the notebooks, I asked Martin what the situation was. And of course that meant the sleeping dog woke up, and not much later I had a crate full of notebooks in my office.

I knuckled down to make sure I finished quickly! After me, four other people need to get it. I finished it on a late Wednesday afternoon. And Jaco would be next. But he wasn’t in on Thursday, so he wouldn’t start until Friday, almost two weeks after the trip. Oh well! I did my best. It’s out of my hands now! I can go back to more stereotypical activities for the first week of term. Like preparing and recording lectures… 

Progress on the bridge

Almost two years ago, the bridge I bike over twice a day suddenly closed. Its structural integrity had been questioned; the bridge deck is held up by steel hangers, and these apparently needed to be replaced. And that is a sizable job! Soon that work started. And that meant traffic lights, as only one lane of the bridge would be open to traffic. Not an enormous deal, but inconvenient.  And I had no clue how long it would take. 

What happened was that all hangers were festooned with auxiliary steel cables, and fences were put up between the pedestrian path on the outside, and the lanes for cars and such. The steel cables would only come off when the hanger was replaced. 

Recently I started to notice the fences starting to come down. And now the entire eastern side of the bridge has both been cleared of auxiliary cables and of fences. And the northern part of the western side too. Would work be coming to an end? I hope so! It would be great if traffic could just flow over that bridge unimpeded again…

Notice fences and auxiliary cables only on the other side! 

View from the mainland side

Term starts for real

We the fieldwork crew already started teaching two weeks ago, but now term has really kicked off. On-campus teaching has started again. Summer is over! And from experience I know that in a day or two, it becomes the new normal. 

Term means seeing students every day, and travelling to and from Bangor a lot, and short deadlines. Instead of having a load of things that need to be done by the start of term, it will now be lots of smaller things that need to be done by tomorrow. That’s different! And I’m afraid I work more efficiently this way. I suppose that teaches me I should manage myself better in summer; if I could just work at the manic speeds of term time then, I’d have more time for fun stuff. 

I didn’t start particularly well, as I had made a show and dance of publishing the module website of the dissertation module, and then completely forgot to do the same with my other modules. Oops! But the students seemed very forgiving. Let’s hope that stays the same, but that my performance improves! Stay tuned…

My bike parked at Brambell building, where my first lectures took place. I wasn’t keen on its looks initially, but it grew on me…

Blast from the distant past

I have been blasted from the past a lot lately! I had been visited (and sort of visited) by friends I knew from my time in Plymouth and Amsterdam, and I had caught up a bit (via email) with my old Norwegian landlady, and with Neil (also from my Plymouth time). But now a blast came from even further back.

I suddenly got a friend request on Facebook from a bloke I had been friends with in secondary school, in the early 90s. That is a while ago by now! So I accepted it. And I was of a mind to send him a message saying something along the lines of "crikey, it has been a while" but he beat me to it. And he suggested catching up, be it by written word, phone call or video call. That sounded good. I voted video call.

On a Sunday morning we had the call. I had already seen on his profile page that he hadn't changed much, of course. People rarely do! We both seem to remember we had only seen each other once after I got my A-levels, but we couldn’t agree on at what occasion, so our memories might not be overly reliable when it comes to that. Nonetheless, we pretty much picked up where we left off. 

Bringing people up to date after more than 30 years is a bit of a job, so we figured after an hour or so we were not done yet. And we will call again. And I might even pop in and drop by for a cup of coffee next time I am in the country. He still lives in the same town, and that's where my mother lives, so that's my base then anyway.

This came falling out of the sky, but I'm glad it happened! My head is sucked into a wormhole taking me back to my teens. Which might not necessarily be an unmitigated joy, but that doesn't mean it's not a good idea to reflect on that with someone who was there. And it's very interesting as well (for both of us) to, after all this time, get to see what was behind all that teenage posturing that was going on… who wouldn't want that?