Intersection Logs

	Ocotillo
	Claret Cup

I think the gate seating areas of O'Hare's Terminal 3 are overdue for a refit; as far as I can tell they haven't had one in the fifteen years I've been coming through there. The seats are still structurally sound, but they're looking shabby, with bits of rubber trim dangling loose, and the ratio of payphones to laptop-charging stations seems to have been set in the 1990s if not earlier. (The concession areas and bathrooms have been improved, however.)

Tally of things (accidentally) left in Sheffield that I've discovered so far: one pair pink fluffy slippers, three beads, and a rather nice shirt that I might be wanting to wear again in a couple of months.

I was able to get the cable-box reset at 6am on Sunday by pressing buttons on the phone, without bothering a live person at all. This strikes me as progress in one sense, but also presumably means that there are fewer low-level support jobs at the cable company than there used to be.

I'm in Chicago, waiting for the evening flight to Tucson.

I get the distinct impression that I'm not alone in this, but I seem to be coming down with a cold -- probably the one that was going around the French conference, which I thought I was successfully fighting off last week but which the flight from Manchester seems to have given the upper hand. I'm not sure antihistamines are the best idea on top of what's already been an eighteen-hour day, but they're what I have, and in the process of delving in my backpack for them I discovered that I have inadvertently carried a 2-oz bottle of Purell, not protected by a Freedom Baggie, through security checkpoints at two major airports without raising a peep.

Only seven more hours until bedtime, I hope.

Today was the conference excursion to the little coastal town of Cassis, not far from Marseilles. The day included a boat ride to view some spectacular limestone cliffs and the inlets -- believed to be drowned river valleys -- known as the Calanques. The weather was lovely in the morning; in the afternoon, as we were turned loose to wander the harbor and surrounding streets after a lavish lunch, it clouded over and even rained a bit.

There are more pictures at the Flickr set.

Long trip, busy now. But there were no hitches with the train parts of today's trip, and only minor ones with the ancillary bits.

So far, after an hour or two of hotel wireless, the poor bandwidth-starved laptop (offline for a whole week) has slurped down four Norton updates, three Windows updates, a Firefox version and a Flash player update. This may be why I wasn't getting much of anywhere with it using the free Wifi at Saint Pancras Station, though I did manage to get Google to divulge the address of the hotel, of which I had unaccountably failed to bring a note.

I hope I'll be taking the train to Lille and on to Aix-en-Provence tomorrow morning. There was a rather worrying email this morning from a colleague who arrived in Paris to find he'd been bumped from his connecting flight due to knock-on effects from industrial action earlier in the week, which apparently affects the TGV as well, but we'll see. I can't find any information indicating I might have a problem tomorrow, and as the TGV seats don't seem to be reservable anyway it may just be a case of a more crowded train.

I had a nice week in Sheffield. The warm dry weather has been ideal for peonies; they were lovely in the Botanical Gardens, which otherwise seemed to be suffering somewhat from the lingering effects of the severe winter, or the recession, or both, and amazing at Chatsworth -- huge delicate confections of light and sweetness in white, pink, and red. Yesterday was all about the waterfowl on the Round Walk -- a heron at Wire Mill dam which took exception to being photographed and took off, complaining loudly, after one not very good shot, lots of tiny ducklings as well as adolescent ducks from earlier broods, baby coots, and a delightful bunch of tiny moorhen chicks, which I got the distinct impression that their siblings of an earlier brood were helping to feed.

This afternoon, after locating the hotel, I took off to the South Bank to drop in on some colleagues at the Royal Society science exhibition and take in some of the other displays. I was interested to see the UCL entry on ice and water -- including an iPhone game arranging water molecules. Back in my grad student days, I spent a lot of time contemplating arrangements of water molecules, with the help of colored pins, paper clips, and index cards. When I couldn't stand the heat and crowds in the exhibit hall any more, I wandered out onto the river bank, took some photos of the London Eye and the Houses of Parliament, and crossed the Jubilee bridge to catch the tube back at Embankment.

There are some sketchy characters hanging around downtown Aarhus of a summer evening ...

Back at the old familiar Palo Alto Super 8, the roving Tucson helioseismologists' home away from home. And while I'm waiting for a file to download that would have taken seconds at home, I snatch a moment to mention that the hills around LA are amazingly green, and there are wildflowers blooming in the scrubby grass between the runways at LAX. Also, bright pink patches of something -- iceplant, maybe? -- all over the shoreline around Oakland, which surely has one of the prettier views from the terminal that can be found in US airports. This part of the world takes me by surprise with sheer prettiness nearly every time I come, but particularly in the springtime. There's a huge camellia tree, laden down with blooms, just down the street from here, and we passed a passionflower vine on the way to the Fry's Electronics (which closes early on Sundays, boo.)

At some point between the London days and now -- probably the point in 2006 at which I lost control of my suitcase and nearly took out a colleague in a Copenhagen commuter train station -- I seem to have lost confidence in my ability to safely negotiate escalators while wrangling luggage. I suspect the progressive glasses don't help with that, either. I'll go out of my way to find elevators instead, or failing that climb the stairs the hard way. Yesterday's trip via MARTA from Peachtree Street to the airport involved a lot of stairs, mostly downward, by the end of which my knee was protesting. Today the knee is right enough, but my calves are stiff and sore.