Back for a few days
Jun. 8th, 2026 03:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
procyonraccoonI am travelling so much this summer that most of my visits to the UK are shorter than virtually any of the trips abroad. This was true two weeks ago when I zipped in and out for Confuzzled and it was true the past five days: I flew in from New Mexico on Wednesday, and today I'm already leaving again for my next journey (which I'll have lots to say about next week).
With only two days in the office I spent much of the time at work attending meetings with my students and catching up with various other delayed and deferred tasks - of which there were many, although as there are no imminent deadlines for a little while I've been feeling more relaxed than I expected.
I also did have more-or-less the entire weekend available to me, so I was able to get out of the apartment for most of Saturday. Baloki had previously held a birthday party for his 40th on the previous weekend, and I'd missed that due to being at the meeting in the US, so I offered to get dinner with him this weekend instead. We went to a couple of museums in Manchester during the afternoon and then Doveux joined us at a pub in the Northern Quarter before continuing on to dinner at a Thai restaurant, which was very good. After that Doveux invited us to the improv event that he was taking part in a short walk away in Salford: Baloki was feeling unsettled and needed to head home but I decided I might as well follow along to see what it was about. We arrived just in time to sit down for the 8pm act (put on by an American couple), then he and I sat down in the beer garden outside to chat for a while. Midway through our conversation the actors came out and ended up sitting down with us for a while, and I was amused to discover that they had previously lived in San Francisco (at around the time I was there), in Los Angeles (at around the time I was there), and they at least claimed to know the other grad student in my research group at Berkeley who was very into improv at that time. Small world?
I would have liked to have stayed around to watch Doveux's group's show but it was not until 10:30pm and so getting the train home would have been an issue, so once he had to leave to go rehearse (at around 9:30) I decided to call it a night and head home myself. Sunday was pretty much just cleaning, working, and packing to get ready for the next trip!
With only two days in the office I spent much of the time at work attending meetings with my students and catching up with various other delayed and deferred tasks - of which there were many, although as there are no imminent deadlines for a little while I've been feeling more relaxed than I expected.
I also did have more-or-less the entire weekend available to me, so I was able to get out of the apartment for most of Saturday. Baloki had previously held a birthday party for his 40th on the previous weekend, and I'd missed that due to being at the meeting in the US, so I offered to get dinner with him this weekend instead. We went to a couple of museums in Manchester during the afternoon and then Doveux joined us at a pub in the Northern Quarter before continuing on to dinner at a Thai restaurant, which was very good. After that Doveux invited us to the improv event that he was taking part in a short walk away in Salford: Baloki was feeling unsettled and needed to head home but I decided I might as well follow along to see what it was about. We arrived just in time to sit down for the 8pm act (put on by an American couple), then he and I sat down in the beer garden outside to chat for a while. Midway through our conversation the actors came out and ended up sitting down with us for a while, and I was amused to discover that they had previously lived in San Francisco (at around the time I was there), in Los Angeles (at around the time I was there), and they at least claimed to know the other grad student in my research group at Berkeley who was very into improv at that time. Small world?
I would have liked to have stayed around to watch Doveux's group's show but it was not until 10:30pm and so getting the train home would have been an issue, so once he had to leave to go rehearse (at around 9:30) I decided to call it a night and head home myself. Sunday was pretty much just cleaning, working, and packing to get ready for the next trip!
