++Age

Well, once again, I had a crazy crazy week. I finally booked everything to go to California one month from tomorrow, about which I'm super excited. Not only do I love these meetings, but I get to see my family and stay in a posh hotel with a room all to myself for a week. Anyway, that's all taken care of. Thanks to British Airways threatening to strike, I am relegated to Air New Zealand from London to Los Angeles and get no frequent flyers out of it. So sad. I really could have used those extra few thousand miles.

On Friday I had a really busy day. I went to the observatory to teach classes after lunch. It was the last day for this round of labs, so there was lots of panic setting in for the students who frittered away the last few weeks. Once we got rid of all the students, my friend's group of boy scouts was coming to visit to complete their Astronomy Badge. 18 8-10 year old boys were let loose on us on a Friday evening. It was utter chaos. Utter chaos. My friend said at least they were standing on the tables shouting things like 'Mars! Space! Stars! Planets!' as opposed to just punching each other in the kidneys which apparently is most Fridays. It is true; at least they were completely wired about science and not just being completely belligerent. Since I had never done a public show at the observatory I had to be partnered up, which is fine...I don't think I could have handled those boys by myself anyways. We split them up into two groups and one of my friends took the first bunch to show them a scale model of the solar system, give a talk on eclipses and meteors and show them the telescope. My partner and I took the other half to the planetarium first to give them a planetarium show, which always goes over well. Then we swapped with the other guy, who was looking completely ragged as we passed each other. I gave the talk to the boys and they were alright; I have definitely seen worse, but it was pretty stressful to be doing for two hours on a Friday night.

After we got all of them out of the observatory, I went straight to the pub to meet up with everyone else. Of course it was 9pm by now so the pub had stopped serving food. I did get a great surge of friendship and loyalty though when we saw a guy who had dumped me in the pub hitting on another girl. Grand conspiracies started to develop that included spilling beers, kicks to the groin, elbows to the face and all other manner of terrible things. None of this happened of course, but it was nice to have so many people on my side. Once we finished our third round we stopped by the chippies on the way to my supervisors house for some fine whisky tasting. He had just picked up the new year of Port Charlotte whisky, the PC8. He still had half a bottle of PC7 so we got to do a nice little taste comparison. I greatly favoured the PC8 over the PC7. It was a little smoother and a little woodier. Of course, at £70 per bottle, I am not going to be rushing out any time soon for my own.

On Saturday, my friend who lives in Lincoln came up to visit for the night. This is the girl I visited over the summer and we knew each other from the University of New Mexico. She has since gotten engaged so there was a lot to talk about. She asked me to be her maid of honour, which was really generous of her. She is having a Victorian-themed wedding so I am charged with finding my own dress for it. Right now I am looking at Winona Ryder's dress from Bram Stoker's Dracula, the one with Gary Oldman, yes, that one.

I took her to Cooper's for dinner and to watch the England-Wales 6 Nations Rugby game. She was really afraid to support England, and to be fair, most of the pub was going for Wales, but I hope she noticed that there were the odd England supporters throughout the pub who were not getting stabbed or kicked out. England won, of course, so there was much subsequent drinking in the pub.

The next day, she was meant to catch the 2 o' clock train to Edinburgh, but since Scotland was playing France in the 6 Nations Rugby at 3 o' clock, I suggested it would be a better idea if I went to Edinburgh with her in the morning so we wouldn't have to worry about the commute, which was insane anyway. I love the Scotland spirit. She seemed a little freaked out about it and was still nervous to be English in that crowd, but I was having a blast. There was another group of guys next to us on the train and one of them said to his friend 'Man, you must be the only English person on this train. I bet you don't know who you want to lose more, Scotland or France!' I hope she overheard that to know that we do not take this stuff so seriously... well, we take it seriously, but we are used to losing so it's all in good spirits. It was fun queuing for the train as well because there were tons of men (large, scary looking men) in their rugby shirts and kilts. Hurray. I enjoyed being in Edinburgh as well since it had been a long time since I had been. It is such a tourist town, but it is nice to visit and it was a lot of fun since the rugby game was there.

I saw her off and caught a train back to Glasgow, running back to meet people since it was my birthday(!) and we were going to a pub. Usually in the department, we all go out for a nice dinner, but lots of people were at the rugby game so we pushed the dinner to last night. As a preventative measure to me ending up on my couch cuddling an empty bottle of Malbec and watching Frasier, the few people who were here insisted on going out to a pub, thankfully. We were going to go to Tennents and I was about to hit a 3 year streak of shrimp-and-chips birthday dinner, but unfortunately we forgot that after the rugby, there was a Chelsea Football game so there was no chance of getting a table. We went instead to a poncy little place on Ashton Lane...not really my style, but we got a nice table and one of my friends and I got into a tennis round of French Martinis (she bought, then I bought, then she bought, etc...) Then one of the people who was at the game showed up when he got back from Edinburgh, and there was only a few of us left, but we got a nice round of gin and tonics and played the arcade pub-quiz in the pub. We ended up winning a pound, so it was okay. Overall it was a nice birthday. My flatmate even surprised me when I got home with a Bill Bailey DVD. I was super happy! (Bill Bailey, here, is a musical comedian who starred in the show Black Books, which is where I first saw him).

Last night, like I said, we all went out to dinner at the Velvet Elvis, a place WAY down in Partick that a few had wanted to try for a while. It was pretty funky and their menus were all printed on LP covers with the records inside with a note saying 'Well, what did you expect?'. One of my friends ended up with a Green Onion LP in fairly decent shape and they let her take it when we left. The food was your general nice Scottish fair. I got a decent burger and a starter of Chicken Liver Pate, for which I had been jonesing for ages. Overall it was a nice place and they all generously paid for my meal. The night came to an early close, which was kind of disappointing, but it was a Tuesday, so we were all able to make it bright and early into work today.

Two big things going on next week, so there will be plenty to update next Wednesday! Until then...signing off.