Day 26

Had a lovely afternoon skype with Mrs Butler... thanks for brightening up our afternoon! Received a fabulous Maths package (thanks Mrs Phillips!) which I can’t wait to begin tomorrow... I’m not sure the children are quite as excited as I am about that! We had quite a subdued day where we stayed warm and recovered from the weekend’s antics and then had an evening outing when Ray arrived home. I am finding it quite an effort to drag the children out anywhere during the day especially when they are eager to stay in the warm.

I’ve realised that we have spent the last seven and a half years being a little paranoid about baby seats, booster seats and seat belts while travelling at home. How heavy, how tall are the children? Should they be in this seat or that seat? Quite a topic of conversation at times for parents in Eastbourne and I guess the rest of the UK. Yet we are now almost back to our pre-children travelling days where we just piled into the back of a pickup truck or travelled in rickety old mini-buses. Here we pile the whole family into a tiny taxi with no mention of seat belts and all sit on laps. Crazy!

Ali

A day of lectures, labs and tutorials. Actually it is a lot of fun interacting with the students.  Whilst many traits of students are universal, guess which ones, being with chemical engineering students that haven’t studied chemistry does present some interesting reactions. They started out with a clumsy approach to anything chemical, but by the end, they at least had performed a beautiful kinetics experiment where their colourless solutions all turn blue in an instant, after a certain amount of time. It may be that I was more excited than they were. It was curious that one of the former members of staff within Chem Eng has decided that practical labs could be effectively displaced with computer simulations. I have strong reservations about this, even for engineers. If I get the time and energy, I will push to reorganise the Chem Eng course to have more chemistry right at the start. I also want to introduce a new lecture based on advanced engineering in nanotechnology, but the field is quite young and I’d have to write my own book to support the material I want to lecture on. And there’s still a whole load of other things that require urgent attention. It would be easier not to sleep for the next month and just plow through the mountain.

Had a great family trip out to the Mega store after work. Decided that we should by a half price Lego set and keep it aside for Matthias. Unfortunately it did involve a lengthy discussion with a tearful Rebekah about saving her money for the things she wants rather than buying every little thing every time we go out the door. Still the chocolate milkshake helped as did the burger. I should add that in my defence, I only ate half of it and it currently is the only source of vegetables I can get instant access to. Whilst shopping in Ramstor, I realised that a label for an item on the shelf had an English translation. I then looked at similar items and saw they too had an English translation. After walking the length of the aisle it seems that every item has an English translation. Super sleuth that I am, only realised this after shopping there almost every Saturday for the past three weeks! The wonderful people of Ramstor at Mega cater for us English speaking lot too; would have helped if I had realised this sooner.

Ray