YOU CAN FIND ANYTHING ON YOUTUBE

And that's a very good thing. I want to share with you the experience of my and Ray's daily morning commute, if we are stupid enough to leave our house at 8:45am. Check this out, keeping in mind that undergraduate classes start at 9am.

Now you see why we try to avoid, at all costs, running late in the morning. The thought of dealing with this cycle rush (we cycle along the exact route in the video, on the left side of the screen) can pull me from my bed on a dark winter morning like no screeching alarm clock can.

The main problem, aside from the sheer volume of cyclists, is how aggressive they can be. Hell hath no fury like an undergrad about to be late for an important lecture, apparently. I've been tail-gated far worse on my cycle than I ever have in the car - and Myrtle doesn't offer the safety benefits of airbags and seatbelts. I think that the main issue for me is that I've become accustomed to cycling amongst fairly heavy car traffic, but it's been almost two years since I've commuted into town and faced the hundreds of bikes. At this point I almost prefer the cars!

HELLO, STRANGERS

I'm baaaaccccckkkkkkk....

At last I have time to jump into one of my New Year's resolutions and get back to blogging. The absentee-blogger guilt was getting to me! I'm happy to report that since my last post, I've found and begun a new job (another research post within the university) and have had time to take a post-holiday breather. Hopefully things will be settled down enough finally that I will have time to reflect on life a bit more instead of just flying through it.



Our most recent adventure involved a trip to York last weekend, home to York Minster (check out details and history at York Minster ). I'm proud that we're not yet completely English-ized: the three-hour drive from Cambridge didn't phase us. Our tales of visiting York "for the day" raised a few eyebrows amongst our Brit friends - in England, anything over an hour away is considering travelling a distance.

Now that we've been in the UK for over two years, we've seen a cathedral or two - but I still was impressed by York. It's huge, and the roof span was amazing. I could have sat and looked up for a long, long time.

The stained glass windows were some of the largest and oldest I've seen, and the intricate stonework was also impressive. It's these sort of details that really make me conscious of the thousands, if not millions, of hours of work that went into a building like this. I can't quite get my head around the dedication required for that sort of project, never mind the thousands of years of history attached to it.





Aside from the above-ground splendor, the cathedral also had a really interesting underground exhibit where we could see the original Roman foundations from nearly two millenia ago, followed by Saxon and Norman modifications that turned the site from a fort to a place of worship. I couldn't take photos down there, but what I found most interesting was the layers of stone built on top of one another; there were differences in type of stone, the way it was cut, and the way it was secured. I could literally run my hand along history.

Hmmm. And now I've run out of things to chat about (hard to believe, I know!), so I'll wrap up 2007's inagural post with a hope that you are all finding great joy in the New Year. Welcome back!