They've all gone to look for America...

This one is a bit late, I wrote it on Friday but have only had the chance to actually post it now. Keep your eyes peeled for more about New Haven and Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts...

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At the moment I am sitting on the Greyhound looking out over a freeway to a grim sky that looks like it’s about to fall at any moment. And it’s great.

I know there’s been a delay in updating recently. I was going to wait until I had a proper moment to blog about New York, as I promised I would. It’s only now really that I’ve had the time and/or inclination to actually update, and I don’t think I could do NYC justice now. The delay may have something to do with the fact that before now I have not been sitting with nothing to do but watch the world go by. There have been times when I have been sitting doing nothing but watch the world go by, but usually I have actually had something I have supposed to have been doing, and shamelessly blogging for an hour is a little more blatant a method of procrastination than even I can handle.

As you may or may not know by now, I’m done at the University of Delaware now and am off on my American Adventure. It was my last day yesterday and I received both a free lunch and a free oversized teacup from people in my lab, which was very pleasant and has led me to resolve to leave jobs more often. I have enjoyed working in the lab; everyone has been very friendly and, despite experiments not working, hours of data analysis/making pretty graphs and lots of little fiddly bits that are rather dull but require attention, the work itself has been pretty interesting. I should perhaps admit that I don’t feel I have done nearly as much work as I should have done (lack of sleep, complete absence of self discipline and a 60 second attention span may all have contributed to this), and I do wonder how much help I have actually been. But oh well, I’ve liked me working in the lab even if noone else has.

Having a much more accurate view of PhD life has not made it any easier to decide what to do after graduating. I really enjoyed the atmosphere both at UD and at the OU. Everyone is a bit of a geek (a bit more than a bit of a geek in many cases) and I like that; I am among my own kind. I don’t honestly know, however, whether I could hack life as a PhD student. As I said earlier, I do not have the greatest motivation or attention span at the best of times and being honest I know I’m not one of the obscenely bright people who will have a glittering career in academia. It seems like a long time and an awful lot of money to spend on something I won’t ultimately be that good at. But oh well, something to think about I suppose.

As I (think I) said in my last post, I’ve spent the last two weeks staying in a Typical American Family Home, in this case the home of Chris, Skip, Ben and Caroline Cook. Although I was a bit apprehensive about it before I went, I don’t honestly think it could have turned out better. I don’t want to gush for fear of embarrassing them in front of the whole interweb, but I will say that they are lovely lovely people who are very kind and accommodating who are good fun to be around. Plus they introduced me to steamed blue crabs, meatloaf and the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. It should be mentioned that ever since I was little watching Sesame Street, I had never seen the point of a sandwich with peanut butter and jam on it. But now I do. Seriously. In return I introduced them to Marmite, so I’m not sure they got the better of the deal there (although I did have to watch High School Musical*) They also experienced the HP sauce bacon sarnie and jelly babies, so I wasn’t completely evil.

Eep I think I have finally arrived in New Haven, Connecticut, where I shall be staying with Emma. I was going to write about other stuff I did with the Cooks, but I shall have to leave you with pool party, Rita’s, Baltimore, barbecue and Blue Rocks game.

*Just don’t ask. To know about High School Musical is to become part of it, and have it’s squeaky clean songs branded onto your brain.