Well, I'm here sitting in the airport terminal in Denver, Colorado. I woke a bit before 6 am and tried to stay in bed but couldn't, so I packed and after checking my email at work and getting some cash, I arrived at the airport way to early. I had presumed that a lot of people would be travelling ahead of the long weekend, but the local airport was fairly dead as always. The cab driver mentioned that most students have already gone home for the summer so it's not as bad as say, Thanksgiving.
I'm not exactly sure where my diary is up to, but I have another 2 hours to kill before my connecting flight leaves for Miami, so I figured that this was as good a time as any to catch up on my well overdue diary entries.
Life here has been a lot more enjoyable of late now that I have some people to hang out with. Tiffany is a good friend, and so this weekend just gone I hung out with her and her brother. Friday night we wanted to see the new film “28 Days Later”, but contrary to expectations, it wasn't playing. Instead we went and watched the amazingly uninteresting “Laurel Canyon” which bored us to tears. The next day I got up late and did the usual domestic chores before the three of us went to go see “Charlies Angels 2”. I have over the last month seen more cheesy blockbusters than in the past year or two. The movies was a series of apparently unrelated scenes with “ain't we cool” stuff intermingled with cameos by other actors. After that we kicked back for an hour or so before heading down to see Shakespeare in the Park do a Montana version of “She Stoops to Conquer”, a play I had heard of but never seen. It was quite enjoyable and thankfully unlike last time it didn't rain at all. The three of us went back to Tiffany's room and played Nintendo late into the evening and so it was about 2 am before I got to sleep.
The next day we were all rather tired, and so we didn't do much of anything until later in the afternoon. Brandon had never climbed the “M”, so we all jumped in his car and drove out there. The hike seemed a lot harder than last time, but the weather has become a lot hotter since we last ventured up the side of the mountain. Nevertheless, we managed to make it up to the top and then much more carefully back down again. We hung out for a little while, but I was hot, sweaty and tired and so I went home for a long shower and some sleep.
4:23 pm – Somewhere over Kansas.
In terms of work, the last few days have been fairly unexciting. I'm mostly finished redoing the paper I've been working on, and provided my boss puts in the comments he wants, we should be able to submit it by next week perhaps. Being in a paper writing mood therefore, I've already started on the next paper even though we don't have any results yet. This is part of the collaboration with the physicists, and I have an idea of how things might turn out, so I can start putting the bones of the paper together.
Speaking of journal articles, two odds things happened recently. First I went to the homepage of Inorganica Chimica Acta to find the appropriate journal style to use. While there, I found that my original supervisor in Australia had finally published some more of my Ph.D. work. That was a pleasant surprise and so served as the basis for the current article. Yesterday I also received an email from my ex-supervisor in Miami, who said that another article had been accepted for publication pending minor corrections. Thinking that he was going to be out of Miami over this weekend, I mentioned that I was going to be in Miami over the weekend. He suggested we meet up, something which I'm not overly keen to do, remembering unpleasant meetings from the past. Whether that will happen is not yet certain. Going back to Miami is somewhat bitter-sweat for me, I made some really good friends down there and it was really heart-wrenching to have to leave them behind. At the same time, the climate (horrible humidity) and the management style I worked under really made me happy to be able to finish up. Part of me didn't want to go back so I wouldn't have to remember my loss again. Travelling between Montana and Miami is not at all cheap, and so this is why it's the first time I've been back since mid December of last year. A lot has changed since then, Debbie has had her baby, Anthony proposed to Jill, and Jill is now pregnant.