University of Bristol

The University of Bristol is at the top of a big hill and is beautiful. It's also dingy, like most things here -- kind of sooty and run-down.

This is Cotham House, which is the home of the philosophy department.

Inside it really is like a house!

This is the building with our classroom in it (with collaborator Jer heading in the door). Over the door it says "Founded A.D. 1679." It wasn't the University of Bristol then, it was a merchants' guild school.

As in the other building, the inside is a gorgeous creaky old mansion.

This is the beautiful classroom we're teaching in.

 

Bristol living

I have it pretty good here. I'm staying in an apartment of my own (AirBnB) on a cute little street called Sweetman Place. There are two delightful cafés within a couple blocks that serve excellent coffee, good bread, and very possibly the best donuts I've had in my life.

My apartment is nicely furnished. 

Spiffy kitchinette in the living room. Behind those cupboards is a little dishwasher and a little washing machine! No dryer; as in France, you just air-dry your clothes here. It works. I don't need the second bedroom but it's handy for the clothes-drying rack (not pictured).

The oddest thing about the apartment has been the air fresheners - there were NINE of them stinking up the place when I got here. I think there is still one I haven't found because in a certain place in the house, the smell hits me. 

The kitchen had very little in it when I arrived - no leftover staples from earlier guests and very minimal cooking supplies - but the property manager brought me some mixing bowls and other helpful items, and there is easy grocery shopping very near by. All the dairy products are labeled as to whether they are BRITISH.

Every cafe has hearty sandwiches and most of them offer "toasties," which is their term for a grilled-cheese type sandwich, except they usually have more than just cheese. Yesterday I had an excellent cheese-and-leek toastie. Doesn't that just sound so great? A cheese-and-leak toastie.

Bristol

I am in Bristol, UK for three weeks co-teaching a class called "Co-Constructing Spacetime" with a collaborator at the University of Bristol. It's awesome! My collaborator says Bristol is a lot like Seattle, and I get that; the cities are about the same size, on the water, both with a kind of gritty formerly-industrial now-artsy vibe. But you don't see this kind of thing around a corner in Seattle:

I do a lot of walking here and Bristol is a wonderful walking town. The 40-minute walk from my apartment to campus includes many many steps, called The Christmas Steps, lined with cute little shops.

Turns out they have nothing to do with Christmas; it is a corruption of "knifesmith." There is 256 feet (25 stories!) of elevation gain, which is great exercise, and great views like this one.

As if that were not sufficiently picturesque, there was also a Balloon Fiesta yesterday.

Air quality

Seattle is having bad air quality due to wildfires in Eastern Washington - bad enough that we stay inside with all the windows closed. Fortunately, it's not super hot here, so although we miss tennis, we are fine. 

My department chair is an atmospheric chemist, and anytime there is wildfire smoke, he goes into super data collection mode. He wanted to measure conditions at a variety of locations and asked if our family would help out. It was super cool! He gave us a handheld particle counter.

Each run is one minute: it sucks in air through the silver tube on top, measures the size of particles in the air with laser scattering, and delivers a count of different-size particles, ranging from over 10 microns to less than 0.3 microns. We learned that 10-micron particles are stopped in the nose, 2.5-micron particles are stopped in the throat, and 0.3-micron particles go all the way into the alveoli in the lungs, making them the most impactful to people's health. We were asked to do a series of five one-minute runs indoors, and another series of five one-minute runs outdoors, to help answer the question of how much difference it actually makes to stay inside. Here's Aaron doing the outdoor run.

This is our data sheet. Fascinating! Obviously indoors is way better.

When we delivered this data to the scientists, they were impressed at how clean our indoor air is and asked if we had been running a filter. We have! It's fun to know it makes a difference.

Pandemic camping

We have had quite a few camping trips this summer. In normal years these can be hard to fit in because the kids have so many obligations, but not this year! There are some risks involved for sure, especially the public bathrooms. We wear masks and don't linger. 

Our first trip was to Lake Quinault, just the four of us. The campground was COVID-ready, alternating full with empty campsites.

The most memorable part of that trip, though, was the rain. We were there from Friday to Sunday; it started raining late Friday night and rained continually through Sunday morning. (To be fair, it is the rainforest.) Jordan and Dale built an elaborate tarp shelter, and we spent almost all of Saturday just hanging out in that tiny little outdoor living room, playing cards and eating and reading books. Limited as it was, it was at least different from being at home! We did find a dry hour or two for a walk in the beautiful woods, returning covered with mud. And here we are at some non-raining hour, apparently burning some wet wood.

The other trips we went on have been with friends. We went back to La Wis Wis with much the same crowd and had a very pleasant time. We had to have a zoom meeting in advance to discuss the protocols: no sharing food, masked most of the time, no communal tent for the kids (the kids were all at one campsite but only siblings shared tent space). It works. We've also been back to Middle Fork, one of our favorite spots, but have not been able to camp there: apparently bears have moved in. 

We camped again with friends at a place near Middlle Fork, Tinkham campground, which has a surprising view of I-90 but was better than nothing. Here's a socially distanced group photo from Tinkham... we did a panorama, and did some fancy footwork to get everyone in. See how Aaron is on both sides? 

The only water at Tinkham was from this astonishing hand pump.

We also find time for the occasional day trip. Here we are at Deception Pass early in the summer; we drove up, hiked for an hour or so, had a picnic lunch, and left just as things started to get crowded.

Jordan and Dale have also been on two camping trips without Aaron and me, arranged especially for (and by) the 16-year-olds and their dads. That's fine... Aaron and I are content to stay home and eat sushi.

Oregon coast

Early this summer, Jessica adopted our kids for a few days and took them to the Oregon coast, where she had rented a little beach house for a getaway. They were in each other's bubble for just those few days, and they were soooooooo happy to spend time with friends. This was the view from the house:

Pretty fantastic. The boys spent many hours a day on the beach, mostly digging. As you can see there is plenty of room for social distancing.

In addition to the beautiful sunset, this picture has Aaron and Adam in the foreground, and if you zoom in you can just make out Jordan and Ian's heads peeking up out of their hole down by the water.

We are grateful that our kids had such an idyllic getaway.

Virtual Camp Kesher

We are sad to have no Jewish family camp this year! For a minute there it looked like of all things, the annual talent show was going to be online, which was somewhere between hilarious and torturous to me (the "talent" is highly debatable). Fortunately (?) no one submitted anything. But! People did submit haikus and some of them are pretty darned funny. Over the years, I have become the keeper of the Kesher haiku tradition, so I video-recorded myself presenting my favorites, and posted it all to the camp's Facebook page. It was fun! The backgrounds are scenes from camp.