Despite the title, which is also the title of an utterly depressing but wonderful song that I love, which starts out: “Sunday is gloomy/my hours are slumberless/dearest the shadows/I live with are numberless/…” and wallows in further and darker gloom for the rest of the song until near the end, I mean gloomy here in a neutral way.
It applies not to my mood but to the skies over Vancouver on the Saturday and Sunday set aside for wandering and exploring. I actually found a lot of it quite refreshing (recall that we’ve not had much rain in LA all year) and managed to see several beautiful scenes made all the more lovely for the shades of grey provided by the rain and clouds. The scene with the boats above left is an example. Overall I had a great time exploring, and was shown some nice parts of the city by my hosts, Moshe Rozali and his family (thanks guys!).
The trip was a success, in that I had a lot of great conversations with various people about physics research matters, and also in terms of the main point of the trip which was to give two colloquia to two different Physics departments (UBC and SFU) about research going on in parts of my field. I’ve heard that (despite my running a bit long in both cases) people rather liked the talks, and I’m not talking about people already familiar with my field, but the people from other fields. This is the main point of colloquia, in my book – to give members of a department a sense (in an accessible way) of some of the key issues of the day in some field of research. So in that I succeeded.
Now, back in Los Angeles, it is back to writing lots of letters of recommendation (it is that season again), reading and commenting on dossiers for a faculty search in another department, giving a number of interviews (one to a student about my field of science in general, another to a journalist about blogging about and around science, one to a filmmaker making a new science show to be discussed later (perhaps), and so on), and various other things (including talking about using public transport at an event in the Downtown LA ArtWalk on Thursday). Oh, I’ve got to find time to tell you several things I wanted to blog about in recent weeks about new transportation landmarks (perhaps) in LA, as well as prepare more lectures, and also (over the course of about a week) prepare five research talks and lectures that I will be giving in some interesting places I’ll tell you about when I get to them.
It is going to be quite the week.
-cvj
It was good to have you around, and good the title is not gloomy Saturday…
Glad you had a good time in Vancouver!
I’ve decided to accept restaurant recommendations from anybody who blogs and has a PhD in some kind of science. Phil Plait’s recommendation of the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park was a good one. I’ve already been to Vij’s but not to the Banana Leaf, so I’ll add that to my list of places to go.