Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

who designed the child lock on my new washing machine:

– Yes, setting the lock means that my child cannot change the program by pushing the buttons.  Congratulations.  However:

– By making the display flash when the child lock is on you simply make the display more alluring to small children.

– By making the machine beep every time the dial is turned (with the child lock on) you render children’s actions both harmless to the machine and devilishly annoying to the surrounding adults.  Remember that this is a compact machine, designed for small houses and apartments.  There is nowhere to escape the beeping!

– By making the child lock electronic, rather than mechanical, you leave the machine exposed to child manipulation when the machine is not in use and turned off.  My daughter can simply walk up to it and push the shiny “Start” button to great effect unless I unplug the thing every time it’s not in use.

Is that really the best you could do?

Erin

that I would ever be in a church singing — or, rather, standing in stunned silence while everyone else is singing — “God is fab and he’s my mate”? If this is the intellectual calibre of the hymnody around the University of Oxford … heaven help us.

Sydney

So I know it seems that we’ve been over here forever, but it’s all been a series of small moves to this, our permanent perch.  We’ve only been in this house for a week.  And, after a long week of running errand after errands, chasing down one item or administrator after another, we’re finally feeling somewhat settled.  Our evidence?

– We have a rough work scheduled hammered out, with me running off to work in the Bodleian in the mornings and Sydney doing the same in the afternoons.  We’re hoping to find more work time eventually (perhaps with my morning beginning a bit earlier if I have a desk set up upstairs and Katherine resumes sleeping through the nights, and with Sydney carving out some evening hours after dinner), but this is a start.

– We have acquired a bunch of things that should make life around here a lot easier.  A stroller, soon to be a washer, food and cooking implements, etc.  Different bedding: the English seem to believe in really heavy comforters, but we haven’t had a need for anything more than a light blanket thus far.  What is with them?  or us?

– Katherine and I have made regular visits to the university parks, a seven-minute walk away, where I’m trying to coax her to run and play, rather than stand still and stare at the dogs that come by (this is England; there are a lot of dogs).  And I manage to get in a couple of loops around the park, so I’m once again getting some exercise (finally!).

– This morning we made a family trip out to Port Meadow, a huge green area to the west of the city centre.  Sydney went off to birdwatch while Katherine and I said hello to the cows (which share the meadow with the runners and walkers and such, necessitating a lookout for cowpies all the while).  More learning for Erin: England, when windy, can be quite chilly, and a wet wind takes a lot of the fun out of strolls in the meadow.  And if you lean down to clean off the stroller, don’t then brush your hand clean against the nearest green plant; I ended up making contact with nasty stinging nettles, leaving my hand tingling several hours later.  Sydney marvels at my luck.  Katherine, although not quite awake for real play, trotted up and down the path and then gravitated toward the river, where she pointed at ducks, swans, and boats.  She seems a lot more interested in water than in grass and paths; she must be Sydney’s daughter.

– After our morning outing we came home, where I whipped up some cornbread and Sydney made homemade baked beans.  The result was a rather fabulous meal: spicy beans topped with avocado, paired with cornbread that came out quite different from normal–and better.  We found some really dark brown sugar in the grocery store on the way back from our walk, and I used some malted bread flour that Sydney had brought home, so we ended up with a really rich, nutty cornbread.

– Katherine and I are really enjoying the scenery from our front window.  It’s a real treat when I lift her onto the windowseat, where she can watch the people walking and cycling by.  Every now and then they notice us and wave, which makes Katherine turn inside-out with smiles.  She forgets to wave until they’ve walked away, though, so we’re going to have to work on that again.

Erin

The insane number of photos being taken round the clock on the streets of Oxford coupled with my disinclination to be photographed prompted the following back-of-the-envelope (receipt, actually) calculation.

Assume a rate of 100 photos/minute for 10 hours per day (conservative estimate). Assume that the average photo manages to include 5 Oxford residents, whether deliberately or not (again, a conservative estimate, though it’s hard to tell since on some days the majority of people in the streets appear to be tourists). Oxford has about 165 thousand residents.

The photo rate works out to about 22 million photos per year. Using the formula (number of residents per photo(number of photos/number of residents in Oxford)) to figure out in how many photos each Oxford resident will appear (I think this is the right formula, assuming an equal distribution), we get the result that each resident will appear in a little under 700 photos per year.

So that has me appearing in about 2000 photos over the course of three years. Of course, the assumption about an equal distribution is no doubt false. But since I work in the Bodleian Library, I imagine I’m more likely to appear in more than 2000 photos, rather than fewer.

Remaining question: how many of those photos do you think are unwittingly geotagged and will end up on the internet just waiting for somebody with access to a search engine with facial recognition software to be able to trace my movements?

Sydney

Internet arrives next week, so until then we’re limited to a few minutes of email here or there.  We’re busy getting things set up so that we can start really functioning again: getting a washing machine installed, figuring out trash and recycling, setting up utilities, etc.  And we continue the game of trying to figure out where we can get what we need from the many, many stores that surround us.  Good thing for amazon.co.uk!

One big change to our visions about how this whole Oxford thing would work is the proximity of the Bodleian Library to our new house.  It is really only two blocks down the road.  Within five minutes of leaving my front door I can be settling into a grand reading room with lots of studious-looking people.  Our proximity to the library, which is open ’til 10 most nights, means that we should have a lot less trouble juggling Katherine and work space.  We may not even need much of a home office, though I’m not giving up on the idea just yet.  Since I still harbor some fears about completely losing touch with academia now that I am not affiliated with the university by which I’m surrounded, it is somewhat reassuring to be able to walk into a place like this and settle into an academic atmosphere.

Sydney, meanwhile, is trying to figure out the maze that is Merton College, since the place seems largely designed for getting you lost!  He is taking the college up on its offer of free lunches for fellows, which gives him some time to get to know his colleagues and reduces the cooking needs in our house.  That hasn’t kept us from buying a couple of nice saucepans and dreaming up dishes to make once we have a few more spices on hand . . .

Erin

So we were settling into our temporary lodgings, preparing for another move in November to our permanent home.  But on his first trip to his college last Monday Sydney was given keys to “his house.”  When he asked for a bit more explanation he learned that someone failed to mention that he had a family and thus would not be living in the college–and so they set him up with a small house that belongs to the college.  Ahh, gotta love administrative confusion.  When he corrected them, they told Sydney he should check out the house anyway, as it might just be big enough for a small family.  We took at a look at it the next day, and then spent the rest of the week reconsidering the housing plan we spent all summer setting up.  In the end, we decided to take the college housing, since it’s right downtown, just a couple of blocks from the library and Sydney’s college, and it will be less of a financial leap of faith.  We’re still extricating ourselves from the other tenancy agreement, so all is still a bit of a muddle, but we think we are now finally settled into what will be our Oxford home (for the near future, anyway).

So, for those of you who have pledged to come visit us, this is what you’ll now be visiting:

– It’s a small row house on Holywell Street, just three minutes’ walk from all the downtown Oxford sights.  We’re just a couple of minutes’ walk from two large department stores, as well as three grocery stores, so we’ve been busy settling in and equipping our kitchen and the like.

– It’s three floors, but the square footage is roughly that of the apartment we had in Ithaca.  So, quite small.  The first floor contains a living room and the kitchen, the second floor the bathroom and main bedroom, and the third floor is a small study.  The last is key, since the one thing we really needed was some space separate from Katherine’s play space, so that we could work when we’re at home.  So far, so good: she loves the climb to the first floor, but she hasn’t yet discovered the steep, winding steps to the third floor.  We’re planning to keep it that way.  I, meanwhile, have fallen in love with the third floor, reminded of Woolf’s assertions that a woman (and, in this case, a man) need a room of one’s own in order to write.  I didn’t understand that until I had children 🙂

– We’ve been told the house dates back to the civil war (as in the English, rather than the American, Civil War), so it’s quite old on the outside, with remodeling on the inside (as much as such a house permits).  Former tenants of the place warned us that we would get a lot of picture-takers outside our place, since it has the old English stone house look.  And sure enough, by our first full day there I found myself sitting in the windowsill, watching people stop and take pictures of our “picturesque” house.

– The ceilings are somewhat low, so it has a cozy, rather than an airy, feel to it.  If I stand up in the bathtub to take a shower my head just misses the ceiling–as long as I also situate myself between cross beams!

– There is a small backyard, which we share with the tenants of the other half of the house (currently there are none).

The college has nicely outfitted the place with towels and bedding and curtains, so we’re going to focus our energies on getting the necessities (bank accounts, doctors) set up, rather than decorating.  And we’ll take pictures, but it’s going to be awhile.

We’re glad to be home.

Erin

On his first day in Oxford Sydney took care of some of the immediate concerns: pick up mail and his “new fellows” packet, get keys, and buy a tuxedo.  Yes, that last one was high on the priority list, since he has to wear one at many college events.  There are a number of other obscure pieces of clothing he’s required to own.  The vocabulary surrounding all this sends us running to the dictionary, and more than half the time the results read “an establishment at Oxford” or “a form of dress exclusive to fellows at Oxford University.”

We’re working on mastering this, but it’s going to take awhile.

Erin

There is a path that runs along the Thames from where it begins in the Cotswolds (sheep country), through Oxford, to London.  I got out to walk some of it this morning, since the bridge over the Thames is about five minutes from our apartment.  Lovely walk through the riverside park, and then at the edges of farm fields.  It’s not paved, though, and, this being England, the dirt path is muddy and slippery.  Will be looking into waterproof trainers . . .

In other news, Abingdon is hosting a carnival this week, so there is extra confusion downtown as vendors hawk rides and candy floss (I was bowled over by the smell of cotton candy all through town).  Given that all the streets are windy and few are labeled, Katherine put up with a lot of walking and dead-ending before we made it to the town library.  But now we’re the proud owners of Oxfordshire library cards, and I intend to make use of them!

Speaking of walking, I am discovering that backpacking Katherine for miles is no longer as fun as it used to be.  So I’m getting a stroller delivered tomorrow.  That should make grocery runs a bit easier!

Erin

For my birthday last fall my brother, Adam, gave me a webcam.  The idea was to make it easier for Mom and Dad to see and hear Katherine as she grows.  We have used it some since, but haven’t yet worked out all the kinks.  Yesterday, though, Sydney rigged things so that we could use Skype to call from our computer to others’ phones.  Our test call was to my parents . . . at 1pm our time and 7am their time.  We then tried it later, with Sydney’s parents.  It was nice to check in with both of them, inexpensively, and well before we will have a phone of our own hooked up.

Erin

For the curious, I’m including some pictures of the place in which we’ll be staying until our house opens up in early November.  It’s an apartment that was converted from a barn, just outside the town of Abingdon.  Thus the interesting architecture; we’re essentially living in a converted hayloft, a very large, high-ceilinged room with lots of light.  We’ll shortly be moving into a two-story house that has a number of small, closed-off spaces.  Although I’m generally one for large, open spaces, we are guessing that the having of small children will make us quite interested in being able to shut some doors here and there!

Abingdon is a small village about six miles outside Oxford, with regular buses into town.  We’re going to enjoy some country living for a little while longer.  Plus, the grocery store (and other shops) is less than a ten-minute walk away!  Oddly enough, that’s a shorter walk than we’ll have to the same grocery chain once we move into town–but they also have free delivery!  We cross over the Thames on our way into town, and there are a number of large meadows, public parks, and river paths that we can take Katherine to when the weather is nice.  Today it’s a cool, rainy day, and most things are closed on Sundays, so we’re enjoying some rest (and I’m experimenting with the small washing machine) before we venture into Oxford tomorrow.

She’s finally resumed reasonable sleeping habits, for which we are grateful.  Perhaps most importantly, Katherine seems to really like this space.  We haven’t had to say “no” much, since we blocked off the scary stairs to the outside door, and she’s been having a great time running around, exploring.  She loves the little stairs that bridge the two halves of the room, and she’s enjoyed climbing on every couch and opening every cupboard door.  I’m grateful that the washer has a child lock on it, and that we can turn the stove and oven off with a main power switch that’s up high.

Erin