The Woking Martian And The Incident At Falmouth

Dave reminded me that I've been a little quiet as of late, so I'd better rectify that asap. It's been a bit of a busy month, and I'm truly aware of the implications of the curse "May you live in interesting times". The weekend after my last post was Paul's 30th birthday, which we celebrated in part by stopping off in Woking to see the Woking Martian:


Those of you who are sci-fi fans will recognise Woking as the town where the first Martian capsule landed in H.G. Wells' "War Of The Worlds", and the residents are very proud of this fact:


Then the week after that we went on holiday to Cornwall. I'll have a few more things to say about that, but unfortunately the holiday has been marred a bit by a car accident we were in on the last day, just outside of Falmouth. We both have nasty whiplash and the car is probably a write-off, but we're relieved it wasn't much worse.

I'll have a bit of exciting news soon (some of my Facebook friends may already have seen a glimpse of this), which is perhaps one of the most life-changing things I have ever done, and aside from leaving St Louis has met with the most resistance!

AWOL

I've been at my new job for three weeks. It's taking a lot of getting used to. I've gone from a role where the most strenuous activity I would do in a day was a quick dash to Starbucks for a latte, to healthy wholesome manual labour. I've been quite tired, and sometimes find myself dropping off at 8:30 - how pathetic is that?

Anyway, things will settle down soon enough (I'm already not as achy the morning after as I used to be), and one distinct advantage of spending whole days mowing lawns or planting summer bedding is that I have time to think.

I'm thinking about the PhD topic, what bases I need to cover, and who I might need to speak to. Having settled on a very broad topic of the terrestrial palaeoecology of the British Jurassic, I need to focus on specifics. I've had Arkell's "The Jurassic System In Great Britain" out from the library for a bit, figuring that was a decent place to start.

There are some financial issues I need to sort out with the university, which are hanging over me, and then we might be getting back on an even keel. If anyone happened to win the EuroMillions lottery on Friday and feels that £89 million is just too much money, please get in touch and I can alleviate you of the stress of spending at least £20,000 of it.

And I offer my belated but very hearty congratulations to Dr Mike Taylor!