Not much ado about anything

So once again its been awhile since I actually posted anything. After my trips to Munich and Rotterdam I got to visit the exotic, alluring county of Essex in England… Essex is though of more or less like New Yorkers think of New Jersey… with reason. The areas I went to were pretty bleak. Such is the nature of work some days.

After that it was a few weeks of local work, a brief stint at our training centre in the country and a short trip to Oxford. Followed by the last couple weeks with at least a few days up in Cambridge. Cambridge is an odd little town, as are most small university towns. It is definitely dominated by the University and related buildings. If you make it onto campus right now, they definitely don't let you forget that it's the University's 800th anniversary… Some of the work here has ended up with me in some of the museums and collections. In one of them we worked out that my contact might actually know a professor that I had at UNC. Guess the world of prehistoric rauisuchains is fairly small. I also got to see some of Darwins collections from the HMS Beagle, a dodo skeleton and loads of other cool, weird and random things. Basically I was working not just in the main galleries of some museums but through their store rooms and other areas "back stage". It was fairly cool and a bit reminiscent of my early academic days…

At the beginning of November a friend of my from my old office in Sydney came to town. He has some time off work and is following the Wallabies (Australian National Rugby team) around the world. He went to the New Zealand / Australia game in Japan and was going to go to Australia vs. England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Hell of a good tour if you ask me.

He crashed at mine for a bit until his sister came to town and all of us went to the Australia vs England game at Twickenham. The Aussies got the W, 18 -9. They headed off to Ireland for a bit of sightseeing and I joined them in Dublin about a week later…