Just returned from a brief but dense tour of the US visiting various control systems groups and attending a robotics conference. All good fun, some old associates, some new. Lots of "shop talk" (mainly IKEA, H&M and Nordstrom, haw haw). Very hectic, but not unproductive.
Of more general interest perhaps is the weekend in the middle of the trip, which was like a yellow flower stubbornly jutting forth from the cracks between two giant slabs of footpath concrete.
On Saturday I went once again to my favourite drive-by party town, New York City. Mat and Katie were once again perfect hosts*. I arrived just in time to be swept away to Mat's brother's girlfriend's birthday party, a night which
Katie has described better than I could, or indeed she could: the bulk of the descriptive work having been done by a camera who seems now to be the only one to have remembered anything. I do recall my skinny Swedish jeans were falling down a lot, but I bought a belt in San Diego, so it's okay now.
On Sunday we donned some oversized sunnies, ate some eggs benedict or muesli, got serenaded by a deranged hobo, then retired to watch an episode of Summer Heights High and break Katie's workmate's laptop. Those important tasks completed, it came time to walk teary-eyed to the train station where we embraced like three soldiers a long way from home and missing their wives, and said "seeya soon".
So it was that with a lock of Mat's hair in my shirt pocket, close to my heart, and one of Katie's tears syringed up off the dusty Penn Station floor and injected under my eyelid to mingle with my own tears, I was on the train to Princeton.
90 minutes later I arrived at Princeton Junction train station and began a short but soul-destroying conversation with the conductor of the "dinky" about where I should buy a ticket - and which one - to get to Princeton, which at least I could see was not constructive and not likely to become so soon. Just as I was starting to lose all hope and starting to think about founding a children's charity, Joe sprang from nowhere and whisked me to safety (and Princeton) in his horseless automobile.
Turns out Joe and Marietta (friends of the pare's from way back) were on their way to a Hallowe'en party, Joe dressed up as an Iranian Mullah or Ayatollah or some such (long grey beard, black robes, turbaney thing) and Marietta as a Swedish
Lucia girl (coincidence?). I remained at their familiar old house with daughter Annie and her two young children, who are really very talented at making loud noises. Shortly afterwards, J&M returned and we all sat down to a hearty home-style stewpot of goodness, which was (a) free, (b) tasty, and (c) not vomit-inducing. Three points which, taken together or individually, put it a notch above the food at Tau or whatever it was called in NYC.
Over dinner we regaled one another with tales of foreign lands and so on. Joe had in fact recently been to Iran as part of an emissarial group of distinguished scientists, trying to maintain civil relations in the scientific worlds at least. Very interesting. I began regaling about a little town called Umeå, when J&M surprised me by saying they've in fact been here. Apparently in 2001 there was a big thing in Stockholm for the 100th anniversary of the Nobel prizes, and all the surviving winners got to choose a university in Sweden to give a lecture at, and Joe chose Umeå, mainly because he was intrigued by its northerly location!
(The next day we had meetings with the professor of control at Princeton, and found that she has also been to Sweden - though not Umeå - for a 6-month sabbatical, and she could even speak a few words of Swedish.)
Anyway, after Princeton came San Diego and conference and scorched earth and ash-laden winds and so forth, but that's a story for another day.
*-I highly recommend the $99.99 inflatable mattress, best lilo ever.
