Getting ready for the jury service

I had one week of term to get everything as ready for my potential two week absence as I could. I should have mainly been teaching on two modules in that period; for one of them, I basically got all my lecturing out of the way in that first week. I don't have a heavy teaching load in it. 

For my other module, I had to do some crisis management. This is a module of which we have changed the title, as its content had moved more into a climate direction, so we added that to the title. An innocent-looking email from a student lead me to finding out that student administration had accidentally assigned 2/3 of the students to the old version of the module, which we obviously don't run anymore. Oops. 

I will be quite busy on that module after my jury service, as a fair amount of work has been postponed, but I made sure that at least the students are ready for the upcoming field trip. It really depends on how long the court needs me, whether I can actually join myself or not. I hope I can! But I need to be ready to accept it if I can't.

I was also quite busy with student proposals for their own dissertation topics. I will have to keep that going in the evening, I suppose, is the deadline for proposals hasn't been reached yet.

Another thing I did was mark the student notebooks of the field trip we did a few weeks before. We don't do much marking of actual physical paper these days, and it provides complications. There are four members of staff who have to mark these (sometimes it's five, but not this year), and we have four weeks to do it all. You think that that means we all get a week, but that's not how it tends to work. Martin tends to keep them at least for a week unseen in his office. When I got them, more than 1.5 weeks had already passed. I hope the others will manage to do their part of the marking in the remaining two weeks!

Altogether a busy week. But I am satisfied with it. And then on Monday, I will get a better idea of how my next two weeks look…

Needing glute stretches twice daily now

It has been a long time that I need to stretch my glutes every day in order to minimise the chance I have to do emergency stretches when I am trying to walk or run or something. More than five years! 

A pose that works as a glute stretch. Pic by Christy Collins

This morning stretch session largely does the job of keep me going. There once was a time when the glute situation went out of hand; after a long international train ride, my glute became completely uncomfortable, day and night, and I struggled to sleep. Luckily, that situation sorted itself out.

By now I am facing a sort of a combination of the two issues. It is fairly common now for me to be a bit uncomfortable in the glutes when I am trying to sleep. That is quite annoying! It won't go away unless I do an emergency stretch. And there are obviously worse things in the world, but it is still annoying. Especially when the cat is lying next to me, because she won't tolerate such shenanigans. 

Altogether, it just seems like my glutes are slowly getting worse and worse. What is this? I have never heard anybody else talk about this. And it is clearly a slow process, and so far I can solve it with some simple stretches. But if this keeps going on like that, I will have to do these stretches several times during the day! I hope not. Maybe I should ask my physiotherapist if he has any idea. But for now, I will just do these stretches every morning and every night. Age comes with some unexpected issues…

Loot from Tom

My colleague Tom is retiring. He is in his last weeks, and he has started tidying up his office. He has a lot of books that he doesn't want to take home. He is now going around the corridor encouraging everyone to come into his office and raid his book cupboards. And I was included in that.

I got some good loot! A combination of things I find interesting such as the life of Fridtjof Nansen, but also a lot of text books for dummies about physics applied to climate, the ocean and the atmosphere. Tom is actually a physicist by training; he probably never needed those books, but might have reviewed them, and therefore ended up owning them. I (quite unlike him) would actually learn something if I read them. I'm not quite sure when I will do that, but well, for now I can just put them in my office. I made so much shelf space when I was getting ready for my foraminifera encyclopaedia I can afford to adopt a few books, even if I'm not sure I would do something useful with them!

Term starts

The academic year 2026/27 has now officially started. On the Monday morning, at 9 am, I started lecturing. And it will be a very busy term. It is always busy, but now I might lose two weeks without losing the work. That will be trying! But it might not be so bad. Maybe the court won't need me for the full two weeks. 

Either way, it will be all systems go until Christmas. And the Christmas holiday is always so short that it feels like it is all systems go until the academic year is at its end again. Wish me strength!

My bike back on main campus (not by the prettiest of buildings)

Making running and biking safer

In spring I used a voucher I had won in a race; I got all sorts like a new flask, a dry bag, and some miniature lights. I figured I should have tail lights when I run in the dark. My current headlight doesn’t have anything to make it conspicuous from behind. And I have my bike lights, but I prefer to keep these with my bike gear. 

It was spring when I bought all that, so while the flask was taken into immediate use, the miniature lights were just gathering dust. But now it is autumn, and I expect to put them to use soon. 

I went for an evening run and wondered if I could attach one to my running vest. The lights have a sort of bracket you could, in theory, slide over a strap. This has to be a perfectly sized strap though, and what are the chances that you have one of those? I couldn’t attach it to my vest without it falling off, and I managed to put it onto the head band of the torch, but I decided I needed to improve on the fixing mechanism. And I went basic; I just drilled holes in the brackets so I could add something that would prevent the lights from falling off. I was thinking of twist ties as a quick fix. 

I will try them out at the next Thursday Night Hill. I hope it works! And then I will be safer than before. Great! 

The mini lights

With adjusted fixings

Pre-academic year rush

It being the week before the start of term, the mad rush was on to get everything ready. I had done quite some work on my module websites, but they weren’t finished. And I had to update one of our student guides; the one on academic integrity, as it so far didn’t have artificial intelligence in it. The person who had the editable file had been on unpaid leave for a year, so we could only really finish it after she came back. But either way; I had to finish that and published it. And I still had things to organise for when I am off on my jury service. And I had to prepare the first batch of lectures I would give. And get all the dissertation topics ready for the students (who don’t create their own), with a corresponding form in which they list their preferences.

None of this was helped by being quite under the weather. I had felt a bit iffy on Saturday night, and had gone racing on Sunday anyway. Before and during the race I felt amazing! But at night I was quite knackered, and the next morning I woke up with quite some extensive need for handkerchiefs. I did go to work, as I was still in denial about this actually being a medical condition and a contagious one at that, but one of my colleagues on the same corridor was not fooled. So I went home, and stayed there for the next two days. That helped! But I had a lot of cotton wool in my head these days.

Did I get any work done on my application? No! The next deadline is mid December. Will I make that? Questionable! But not impossible. But let's get through that first week first. And then see how the jury service pans out. And then I'll know a bit more…

Retail optimism

The touristy places around here have thriving high streets: Beaumaris, Llanberis, Betws y Coed. The other towns around here follow the general UK (or even global) trend, and have rather sad high streets. And last year, the Bethesda high street got worse. We had a big charity shop at the beginning of the town, but it wasn't viable anymore, and it closed. Yet another empty shopfront!

Soon I heard rumours that it wasn't going to stay empty for very long, though. I heard that one half was going to be a beauty salon, and the other half a florist. That surprised me a bit. I could imagine the beauty salon; if you walk around town you see lots of women who clearly have things done to them, such as fancy nails. But a florist? How often do you see people around here with flowers? I thought that sounded tricky. But I wish them the best.

The new shops

While work on these two new shops was ongoing here in Bethesda, something else washappening in the neighbouring town of Tregarth, that I come through on my commute. Suddenly, a house was festooned with a form that said there was a planning application for turning it into an off-licence. And then, predictably, it turned into an off-licence. While the work was going on I wasn't biking there much, so basically, I suddenly saw it finished and open. Tregarth now has a shop! And it being the only shop in town, I think it has a good future ahead of it.

Siop Tregarth

I know I have been hopeful about new ventures before. Five years ago, there were two changes: one retail unit became residential, and I think that will last, and another one was taken up by a new deli, but unfortunately that didn't live long. That's the risk with new initiatives on high streets.

I really wish our beauty salon and florist all the best! But I don't think I will offer much financial support. I have no intention at all to let people fiddle with me in the name of beauty. And I am quite aware of the environmental impact of cut flowers. And I have too many indoor plants already. So I will offer no more than just wishes. Let's hope it is enough…