Journal entries for November, 2005

I've always been a big fan of astronomy. One reason is that I love being exposed to new, novel concepts, and the universe is big enough that we are continually coming across new things we've never seen before and don't know how to explain. One such example is V838 Monocerotis, a star in our own galaxy. Three years ago, it suddenly became the brightest star in the Milky Way, and then quickly faded again. While it's certainly perplexing trying to figure out what caused its strange behavior, the part I find cool is the interesting image of the star captured by the Hubble telescope.

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After spending so many hours driving in Scotland and Ireland, I got completely comfortable with driving on the left side of the road. Now that I'm back in PR, I'm finding myself actually having to apply conscious thought to remember which side to drive on. Most of the roads I drive are very familiar, so habit takes over. But when I'm turning onto a road I haven't been on before, I briefly find myself trying to remember which side I'm supposed to be on. It's surprising; after years of reinforcing certain neural patterns, I wouldn't have thought that just a few days in a new system would be enough to brush the patterns out of the sand.

I think that just like Mitch Hedberg's "One complicated payment," someone decided that since most of the trip had gone awesome, the last part would be made as difficult as possible. My 6:30am flight from Dublin to Manchester was delayed for two hours because of poor visibility, but we didn't find out until we had left the gate, so we had to sit in the plane for two hours watching the sun come up and waiting for the weather to clear. I didn't really mind much, as I slept right through it, but the delay made it nearly impossible to catch my transatlantic flight from Manchester to Boston. To make things more interesting, my duffel bag decomposed a little more at a critical moment. I hurriedly checked in my bag, the woman stuck the label on the strap, and then as I lifted the bag (by the strap) onto the belt, the strap broke. I sighed and showed it to her and she had to cancel the check-in and check in the bag again to get a new label to put on a different strap. That was the third loss of structural integrity this bag has suffered, and this one left a hole for things to fall out of. Fortunately, I only had large things in that pocket, so nothing got lost, but it was disconcerting. Fortunately, the bag made it home without any further incidents, but it's certainly never leaving again.

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Dublin was fun, though not as enjoyable for me as the countryside. The high point for me, of course, was the Guinness Storehouse. But that came last.

We got up this morning at 7am (OK, it became more like 8:15am) to eat a quick breakfast and catch the "hop-on, hop-off" tour bus that stopped at our hotel at 9. We got off at the first stop, near the General Post Office where the IRA siezed the building in 1916 and declared independence from Ireland (and were subsequently shelled into submission). It also happened to be the location of the 400' Metal Spike Of Annihilation, to my glee.

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The trip continues to be an incredible experience. On Thursday evening we flew to Dublin, spent the night at a hotel there, and then in the morning took another short flight across Ireland to Shannon, where we rented a car. From there we visited the nearby Bunratty Castle and then drove southwest to Killarney, the starting point of the road that circles the peninsula, known as the "Ring of Kerry". We stopped along the way and ate at a small, family-owned restaurant named O'Flynn's, which I loved. The people were so nice and friendly, and the food was great. I had my first pint of Guinness in Ireland (on draught, of course).

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Yesterday Andrés got up and went to class while I worked on processing the pictures from the roadtrip on Sunday. At 3pm he had a one-hour break between classes, so I headed out to meet him at a park on campus. We had some coffee and I went with him to his Scottish Ethnology lecture, where they had a guest speaker giving a demonstration of Appalachian folk songs, showing how they had evolved from European folk songs as they were carried across the sea by immigrants. She accompanied her songs with a dulcimer, which sounded incredible. The sound was reminiscent of one I've enjoyed in some of Joe Satriani's songs, and I always wondered how he got his guitar to sound so soft and melodic. I know he experiments with different instruments, and has a banjo/guitar hybrid, so it wouldn't surprise me if he used a dulcimer or similar instrument on those songs.

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Yesterday was incredible. Gary (Irish), Greg (German), Andrés, and I rented a car and took a roadtrip up to the highlands. It couldn't have gone better, especially considering it was relatively unplanned. The weather even cooperated — yesterday was the only clear, blue, sunny day I've seen since I arrived.

We had planned to spend Saturday, the day before our excursion, making the preparations for the trip; determining a route, making the reservation for the car, etc. We did decide on a basic, flexible game plan, but the car reservation part kind of evolved into "making one phone call that didn't accomplish much."

Update: Greg prepared a map indicating the route we took, and marked all of our stops sequentially with numbers. Very cool of him. Here's the map.

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My first evening in Scotland was an appropriate one. One of Andrés' roommates, Gary (from Ireland), had a friend named David visiting, and it was his last night here. It was a given, then, that we go out to a few pubs. Over our first few pint, Andrés' Scottish roommate, Tony, taught me a few unintelligible Scottish phrases (for example, "See, you! Geddi dinye!" which can be loosely translated as, "Excuse me, sir. Pardon my intrusion, but it appears you aren't consuming your beverage quickly enough."), and I put them to great use throughout the evening.

Over the course of the night, I experienced loud, messy drinking games, a polite ejection from a pub, pissing in an alley in view of pedestrians, yelling my newfound unintelligible phrases at said pedestrians, and passing out on the floor. Ah, I belong here.

Although the medium format film I brought along for the Holga is ASA 400, I've been requesting that they inspect it by hand just to be sure it wouldn't be fogged by the X-ray machines. I've read people mention that they'd had film damaged despite the airlines' assurance that anything below ASA 800 is safe. If it were just one or two rolls, I'd have taken the risk, but this is 15 rolls — something like $35 worth of film, so I figured that just to be safe, I'd ask them to inspect it by hand.

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So hectic. I'm finishing up packing and getting ready to leave for the airport for Scotland. I head off around 2pm, and my flight leaves at 4:14pm.

We had a bit of a complication as far as the trip — as my parents were getting their things together a few days ago, they realized that my mom's and my sister's passports were expired. Ouch.

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Friday morning when I walked down the street to get breakfast, I took the Holga with me, this time loaded with a roll of color film. After only a few pictures, though, the shutter stopped working. It happened just as I was about to take a picture I thought would come out pretty cool, too. It was a yellow hard hat in a red pickup truck bed at a construction site.

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I went to see Jarhead tonight. When I got out, around 11:45pm, I thought to myself happily, "Perfect, just in time to go in to work at midnight." And then I remembered that it was Sunday, and I didn't have work tonight, and I said, "Ah, crap."

Weekends suck when you work night shift. Unless you stay awake through Saturday and screw up your sleep schedule, you are doomed to being awake all through the lonely night and trying to find things to do to pass the dark, endless hours. It's kind of sad that I would actually rather be at work with things to do than sitting here without a care in the world.

When driving from Clemson to Greenville, on I-85, at one point you can see some TV station's radar tower by the side of the road, proudly emblazoned with the "SUPER DOPPLER" logo. I always liked how proud they seemed of it, so every time I drove past that, I'd raise my fist and cry, "Super Doppler!"

I don't watch TV weather much, so I wasn't aware of the contest of one-up-manship going on among TV stations. If only I had known how low my favorite radar was on the Doppler superlative scale.

I'd just like to say that I love polarizing filters and I don't know how I ever got along without one.

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Yesterday morning I dropped off my first roll of medium format film for processing. I took the Holga with me when I walked down the street to the panadería for breakfast, and managed to fill a whole roll (which, in 6x6cm format, is only 12 photos, but still). It's so nice to have a fresh point of view for photography — things don't feel cliche or pointless anymore.

I actually think the biggest difference was just the fact that I could take it with me wherever I went — I never feel comfortable walking around with the 300D because it's so big and noticeable. Whenever I pull it out people say "Wow, that's a nice camera." And I know it's a compliment, but I'd much rather people didn't notice the camera at all. I don't want their attention to be on it; I want them to carry on as if it wasn't there.

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Last night I went out with my parents and grandparents to Borders and then to Denny's. My plan was to go see The Corpse Bride with Giselle after dinner (along with the usual contingency plan of going alone if she proved as difficult to get ahold of as usual).

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