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| Freeway Park |
As usual my lap top is objecting to foreign
wireless networks so I haven’t been posting quite as much as I wanted. Those of
you on facebook have had a bit more to go on due to my succumbing to the
darkside (yes I bought a smart phone), but as patient as I am even I can’t
write a blog from a phone keyboard. [Anybody willing to point out where the
punctuation should go in that sentence, please go ahead!]
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| Freeway Park |
Today sees a week of
my trip already gone. Tuesday saw the final throws of my cold and the
resolution of jet lag. I’m still waking up at 5:30 am but I have started to
feel human in the afternoon! I’ve been leaving the house at around 7am-7:30
each day so really 5:30 is not a bad wake up time except for weekend days like
today – sigh!
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| Freeway Park |
I am staying with the lovely Laurie and John who are making me
feel very much at home. Laurie and I work close to each other in the center
(ish) of Seattle. That is 0.7 miles to Pike Place and 1.4 miles to the Space
Needle (according to google maps on my smart phone [!] ), or alternatively a
parks width away from the convention center. I have been enjoying a quick walk
through the park every day; it has a lot of tall trees and a lot of concrete
paths which I will appreciate when it is raining next! In the UK they would
pull down any trees that grew that well but in Seattle where the sky scrapers
are designed to withstand earthquakes I guess they can cope with a few tree
routes. For those of you who like to know these things I am working at the
Benaroya Research Institute, which is on 9th Avenue and Seneca (more
on work later). Next door they are preparing to build a 30 (?) floor building
by digging a 70ft hole, and I thought I had escaped the building work at
Southmead Hospital.
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| Yes - Freeway Park |
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| View out the building at lunch (Freeway Park from 2nd Floor!) |
So far this week we (Laurie and I) have driven, bused and trained into work. The journey takes the best part of an hour but is fairly pleasant (especially with my – you guessed it – smart phone). I have so far seen Mt. Rainier (perfect name) half and one times, the first half I wasn’t sure if it was a mountain or a cloud so it doesn’t really count. I also get a good view of the docks, whilst coming into the city from the south, and a fab view of the Seattle skyscraper skyline. I haven’t yet succumbed to the tourist instinct to take a photo because I am surrounded by commuters, this week I may just hang up my pride and go for it. On Friday I achieved independence in the shape of 1) getting myself home by bus all by myself (although in fairness the buses do announce the next stop) and 2) buying international postage stamps from the UPS office. With such exciting progress in just one week who knows the heights I might reach next week!
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| View out of my office window! |
Which neatly leads me on to work. First
weeks are always hard, either you feel overwhelmed or you have a lot of tedious
paperwork to fill out, if not both. By the grace of God I have not been feeling overwhelmed,
somewhere in the past few months I have discovered the art of taking each day
as it comes (then again I haven’t got much choice). Alas, God has not released
me from the toil of tedious paperwork. I’ve spent long time staring out the
window. The high/lowlight of the paperwork was the online course in research
ethics which took me about two days to complete. This is good because it
actually gives me a background to understand the legislation and the systems
(not to mention the layout of US grant applications). In some ways I wish there
was something similar for the UK. This was bad because I did it at the
beginning of the week when I was still suffering ‘I should be asleep now’
syndrome so I’m pretty sure most of the content went in one eye and out one
mouse-clicking-finger in to the ‘quiz’ that I had to take after every section.
I guess I know where the information is when I need it. My favourite part of
the safety induction was the earthquake instructions, Laurie assures me that
she has been on the twenty somethingth floor of a building during an earthquake
and they sway quite nicely. My building has only four floors (a baby amongst
giants) so I should be ok. I had not really thought about the fact I am living
within driving distance (less than 150 miles) of Mt. St. Helen’s – day trip J. Paperwork aside it has been
a good week, I have already enjoyed being in an environment filled with
immunologists and started learning about flow cytometry. Flow cytometry is
basically a very clever way to identify different cells and even automatically
sort them, particularly useful in easy to get at complex fluids like blood. The
machines combine clever engineering, lasers, electrical currents, more
electronics, fluid flow, and data crunching software to produce pretty graphs
which of course tell the scientists clever things. Of course the machine was
actually broken this week but how is that new?
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| This weekend we had lunch in Panda Express (I had Orange Chicken and Honey and Walnut Prawns) Happy Me ! |
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