Book learnin' and the other kind.
I started writing this post two months ago. I wanted to make some last entries before a nice "my work here is done" ending, tying any loose ends up. Finishing things without a very stringent deadline hanging over my head has never been my strong suit. Maybe sometime this summer I'll finally post my thoughts on trips to Singapore (14 months ago), Prague (5 months ago), Sweden (also 5 months ago) and Venice (4 months ago). Maybe not. I wouldn't wait in suspense, though.

Anyway, I'm no longer Christina in London or Christina in Bristol, I'm just Christina. This is a surprisingly hard adjustment to make. But writing about my current nebulous sense of home would be dead boring to anyone not me, and not particularly useful to me in settling in here. "Not gonna do it... Wouldn't be prudent."

Okay, here's what I wrote back in April:

A lot of things have happened since March 14, when I flew to Vancouver from London. In the midst of papal and other deaths, royal weddings, elections and Canadian government scandals, I flew back to England for the first week of April to pick up the last of my stuff from Bristol and attend the excellent YOR 14 conference in Bath. People are doing all sorts of fascinating things with OR, and sometime soon I might write about it. In fact, John and I are discussing future collaboration on a blog about performance improvement and improved decision-making in the public sector, or maybe just in health care. But this entry isn't about that.

First, a short but very footnoted-list of things I learned the costly-and-or-slow way that I could have learned by reading but didn't and they might be useful to the world at large or at least Google-happy-but-somewhat-careless-individuals-like-me so I thought I ought to record them in such a way as to improve search results[1]:

1. If you have an expired Canadian passport, Canada customs will accept that as proof you're Canadian when letting you back in the country. If you are so fortunate as to have dual citizenship and to have been born in Canada, you can also enter Canada as a Canadian with your birth certificate and your other passport.[2]
2. If you call a non-residential but not [mobile/cell] phone number in the UK from Canada using YAK, they will charge you the I'm-not-saying-it's-usurious-but-it-seems-highly-unreasonable-to-me rate of 39 cents a minute, and it will show up on your bill as a call to a UK CELL number, EVEN THOUGH IT CLEARLY ISN'T.[3]
3. On a much less frustrating note, since it's related to making money instead of spending it fruitlessly, it is possible to register online for a GST number associated with a Business Number (BN), also available at that link.[4]

[1]Obligatory Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer or a Canadian immigration official or a telecommunications expert, this is just what I've learned.

[2]Obviously this doesn't work for travel to other countries, but knowing this would have saved me quite a bit of time and money not to mention the notary public visit it took to renew my Canadian passport before my return in March. On the other hand, who's to say that I wouldn't have lost my British passport if I hadn't had the new Canadian one to somehow exile from my handbag instead?

[3]As far as I recall Telus only charges the ridiculous rate for calls to ACTUAL CELLULAR PHONES (and really, I don't blame either company because they're just passing on the charge from the UK mobile telecom providers), but not to Local Rate (0845) or National Rate (0870) numbers such as say, understaffed police departments who have to keep you on hold for over 15 minutes when you're to report that you lost (one of) your passports in Bristol just before leaving the country. Yes, the fine print on YAK's rates page does note that you pay the same rate for "SPECIAL COUNTRY TERMINATION" numbers as for CELLULAR numbers, but I'm still outraged.

[4]Which is, I suppose, a roundabout way of mentioning that I'm gainfully employed on a 6-month consulting contract and quite pleased at the opportunity to write off a portion of my meals as business expenses. From my business number registration summary:
Business Activity:
PROVIDING CONSULTING SERVICES TO CLIENTS IN THE FIELD OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH AND FORECASTING/MODEL DEVELOPMENT

Excitement!

Second, a Bristolian blogger passed on this book-related quiz. Due to her being very funny and to my fondness for lists, I'm complying.

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be?
I started that book at some point, but found it too depressing and didn't finish it. I also never finished 1984, because it was too depressing. I think both had depressing endings -- in my teens I firmly believed in taking enough of a glimpse at the end of the book if it was bogging down in the first 20-50 pages to see if the pay-off of reading the rest would be worth it. In the case of 1984, I managed to write an essay about it despite making the judgment call that there was too much dreariness and far too many rats. Either that or I wrote about Brave New World instead. Anyway, if I had to memorize a book and have it shape my life (which apparently is what this is about, not about getting burnt), clearly only good but not too predictable endings are in order. Actually, I'd skip having to memorize anything with too much conflict or strife, so I think poetry is the best bet.

Thus, I pick 100 Selected Poems by E.E. Cummings. According to Amazon's Concordance, these are the 100 most frequently used words in it, with love occurring 71 times, and that works for me:

alive always am april beautiful believe beyond birds children come dares day dear death does down dream earth even everything eyes face father feel fingers first flowers forever give go god good hands having head heart hope joy kind kiss know land less let life little live look love man may means mind moon mountains must nothing now old open pretty quite rain right rose said say see shall should sing singing sky sleep small snow sol something song soul spring stand stars sun sweet things think though thy time tree true uncle upon voice whose without world yes young

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Too many to list, but none in recent years.

The last book you bought is?
I was restraining myself prior to the move, so probably The Wisdom of Crowds around Christmas.

The last book you finished is?
Um. Hmm. It would have to be fiction, since I'm even less rigorous about reading every page of books without a plot. If graphic novels count, probably Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.

What are you currently reading?
This question gave me pause in April, because I'd been flitting about in a desultory manner between about 10 books since October. But now I am engrossed in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink.

Five books you would take to a desert island?
J's list (and her "fat books only" rule) seem pretty good to me, but I'd rather have books I could just dip in and out of, in order to not get distracted from the task of sorting out food, shelter, clothing and mining for chemicals to make big fuck-off flares and fireworks to get me rescued. With that in mind, I'd take E.E. Cummings book mentioned above, Leonard Cohen's Stranger Music, Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are (so that I could learn to draw and also identify the local monsters), a very big blank book (for drawing practice, notes to self, and guilt-free kindling), and the complete works of Jane Austen (because I keep starting and not finishing Mansfield Park and because everything always ends well and that's deeply comforting to me wherever I am).

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
I'm not passing it on to anyone. The stick stops here!

The End.
- posted by Christina @ 11:26 pm 8 comments

 
This is a list of things (and a tangential footnote)

A. Things that are good about this fine Saturday in Bristol:
1. Just after 5 a.m. I talked to my favourite person in the world, who is one of the reasons I'm moving back to Vancouver despite my longstanding Never Move Anywhere Because of Some Boy policy.
2. After that I went back to sleep, and didn't get up until almost 11.
3. When I checked my email before getting out of bed, several friends had written me funny things. Yay for witty friends!
4. I got to the Post Office in time to pick up two items.
5. I now have a mint blue Canadian passport, good for another 5 years. I paid the extra pound for the 48 page version, because in Canada I would have had to pay an extra five or ten dollars for that feature and I like bargains. Through a prodigious feat of mental accounting I count this a win, whisking away the line item noting that in Canada I wouldn't have had to pay a consular fee, or for a notary public to be my witness-in-lieu-of-guarantor.
6. I am also now once more in possession of my BC driver's license and my birth certificate, as well as a mini tripod (not from the Canadian High Commission).
7. After the Post Office, I stopped by a bakery and ordered a delicious veggie sausage roll and a Welsh Rarebit panini*. As I was leaving, two women told me they loved my hat.
   - "I must ask, where did you get it."
   - "A TieRack in Paddington station... I think it was 5 pounds."
   - "It's lovely, very Jane Austen."
8. My quote from Excess Baggage arrived today and, while more than I'd like to spend on shipping, is reasonable.
9. Despite the recent snow and crap weather, the daffodils in the backyard are looking quite chipper.
   
10. In a few hours I will be at Channings Hotel, celebrating Andrew's birthday with most of my Bristolian friends.

B. Things that are less than good about this fine Saturday in Bristol
1. I'm already starting to miss my friends here and in London, and this nostalgia in advance is not very motivating.
2. Thus I haven't yet done any packing.
3. Nor have I done any generating of my final report for work.
4. Due to lack of appropriate footgear, I did not spend the day hiking in Welsh mud with Andrew and whoever else was properly shod.
5. It's kind of chilly and grey and blah out. On the plus side, this mutes my disappointment about the previous item.
6. Because the queue for mailing things was different from that for picking up mail, I neither mailed in my Canadian tax return nor Kevin's quite belated Christmas present. Kevin has provided me with several choice graphical and aural items by post, and deserves better. Given my post office issues, I should have just ordered him the coasters I couldn't resist getting for John because I'm all about sending ambiguously gay items to my straight male friends (and also they were on sale, see above re: bargains).

C. Things to do before moving back to Vancouver
1. Visit Prague and write about it.
2. Apply for and get new Canadian passport
3. Visit friends in Sweden.
4. Fill in Canadian tax return and mail it in.
5. Visit Venice during Carnevale and write about it.
6. Get new Canadian passport
7. Procrastinate semi-productively by checking out Flickr, 43 Things and del.icio.us.
8. Change address at work before Payroll cutoff date.
9. End (regretfully) account with Riverford
10. Cancel Prospect subscription and change address with Economist.
11. Change address with NHS and National Insurance.
12. Pack, give away things I'm not packing, and fill in one of these forms (more info here).
13. Hang out with friends in Bristol and London (in progress).
14. Watch the Night of 100 Dancers.
15. Learn all those fancy airsteps I've always wanted to try.

D. Things that will not get done before I move back to Vancouver
1. Walking in Wales
2. Getting to know barley grist in Scotland.
3. Going on a Round The World trip.
4. Visiting Wales, Scotland, or any African or Asian countries at all.
5. Trips to Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain (again), France (again) and Greece, for that matter.
6. Probably a lot of other things but I'm done with this list.

* if the veggie mince didn't contain anything carcinogenic, it's possible the Worcester sauce in the panini did. I chose not to ask. This was also a topic of conversation yesterday at lunch.

After speculating about which cafeteria items are probably tainted with carcinogenic food colouring, we branched off into discussing the wrongness of veggie-meats, and from there to sausages, and from there to "things that might make Christina stop being vegetarian", namely:
1) sausages (this also involved a discussion of the proper way to make/flavour sausages)
2) living in France or Greece or Italy for a few years
3) if FrenchCo-worker, GreekCo-worker and MoroccanManager finally implement their plans to have a traditional Moroccan lamb meshwee.

Then GreekCo-worker and MoroccanManager had a difference of opinion over just which parts of the lamb go on the spit, after GreekCo-worker told of how the police got called to last meshwee she'd been at, in Cardiff where there's apparently a small Greek community. Someone had seen something of the lamb's head and skinned body on a spit, thought it might be a dog, and reported them for cruelty to animals.

"Head? No!" said MoroccanManager.
"Yes, you must leave the head on," said GreekCo-worker. "Head yes, bollocks yes..."
"No, we don't leave the head on," said MoroccanManager. "But bollocks yes... The bollocks are very tasty. The head we put in a pot and steam it. Some people eat the eyes... I think OtherFrenchCo-workerWithARussianName had an eyeball in Tunisia."
"Eyes, yech," said GreekCo-worker, FrenchCo-worker and I.
MoroccanManager agreed: "I don't eat the eyes. I like the tongue though."
- posted by Christina @ 3:06 pm 3 comments

 
All downhill after thirty?
Yesterday was the first day of my thirties, and apparently senility is already setting in. Or (since I think I nearly left my handbag somewhere this fall and only Grash's alertness prevented the disaster, and I left a wallet on the bus in Vancouver in 1996) it could be that increased age is not adding to my paltry stock of wisdom. Fortunately I'm still occasionally lucky. This is what happened:

Around 7:40 I caught the train to Bristol Temple Meads, but it ran late so I missed the connecting train to Filton Abbey Wood I'd normally take. I waited in one of the customer lounges for 15 minutes for the next one, reading the Economist. Half-way between Temple Meads and FAW I suddenly realised I only had my backpack, and not my handbag. I actually gave a little gasp and put my hand over my mouth. Mentally retracing the morning so far, I'd left it either in the customer lounge or on the train I'd caught to Temple Meads, now headed back towards Severn Beach.

The handbag contained my wallet, and my antibiotics for my stupid cold-from-last-weekend's-trip-to-Prague-turned-into-sinus-infection, and the letter with my new National Insurance number (recorded nowhere else), and my passport, and my phone and my keys and pretty much my entire life. I'd just put my credit card, bank card and 80 quid back in the wallet this morning from the small bag I'd had with me during the birthday celebrations Saturday night. So I was full of self-recrimination and foreboding about the size of Stupid Tax (TM) I'd be paying. I ran from the train station to work (the one thing not in the purse was my work ID) so that I could make some calls and try to track it down.

The train's lost and found property phone people are spectacularly unhelpful. They won't even take your number so that they can call you if your stuff shows up. Nothing gets into their tracking system for 48 hours. And no one answered my mobile when I called it to try to short-cut the whole finding it process. So I took the train back to Temple Meads station where the bag was likely to end up if anyone turned it in. It wasn't in the customer lounge, nor in the lost property area. I took the train back to work, stopping to cancel my NatWest bank card on the way.

Back at my desk, I called to put a hold on my VISA, then checked my email. I discovered that just after I'd hopped on the train back to work the second time the guy who found my handbag turned it in and called Grash and Andrew (using my phone's numbers, for he was clever) to let them know if they could reach me that it was safe. I went back to the train station yet again, picked up my handbag, and was back at work at 11, having arrived there the first time at 8:45. Then I called to unfreeze my VISA.

That probably burnt through my luck for the week, so I'm going to be super attentive in Sweden this coming weekend.

In other news:
a) I've decided I'm moving back to Vancouver once my internship's done in March. Possibly more on this later.

and

b) I went to Prague the weekend of the 15th. I took lots of pictures and enjoyed architecture and alcohol and andel's. Definitely more on this later.
- posted by Christina @ 8:03 pm 3 comments

 
Tips for the Unlucky Holiday Season Traveller
Due to poor travel booking on my part (I optimised on ticket price rather than flight time or schedule robustness), what was scheduled to be a 19 hour journey from London to Kelowna, BC, Canada via Cincinnati and Seattle, if all connections happened as planned, became a 40 hour door-to-door ordeal. Obviously all connections did not happen as planned.

Which sucked.

But I got to Kelowna the afternoon of Christmas Eve, and unlike the poor people I met in Cincinnati I didn't have to spend 36 hours sitting at a gate looking forlornly out the window at a plane that was not boarding, and there were no massive tsunamis killing thousands of people nearby, so it could have sucked much worse. It would also have sucked worse had I not mitigated my booking stupidity with some packing, purchasing, and attitudinal cleverness. My tips:

1. Wear a hat
   Soft hats with brims have many important uses and don't take up much space in your bags. They keep your ears warm in a cute and stylish way. They act as a very thin pillow when you're sleeping against a plane or bus window. They cover up your haven't-showered-in-40-hours hair. Pulled over your face, they not only act as an eyeshade but also conceal that you're sleeping with your mouth open if you are in fact sleeping with your mouth open.
2. Carry it all on
   It's bad enough when you know that you only have 25 minutes from the time your plane has landed until your next plane is due to take off. If you do miss that next plane, though, at least you're not second-guessing whether the time saved not waiting at the baggage carrousel would have made a difference.
3. Sleep better through chemistry
   At Gatwick I did the timezone calculation and discovered my flight from London to Cincinnati was over 9 hours long. Consequently I bought sleeping pills and deep vein thrombosis-preventing flight socks at the airport Boots. I don't know if the sleep socks helped any, but a sleeping pill after the meal had been served made it much easier to sleep through the remainder of that flight, and another before the start of my bus trip from Vancouver to Kelowna made up for my poor-despite-the-hat-eyeshade sleep in the Vancouver airport.
   I don't recommend taking sleeping pills on flights shorter than 6 hours or if you're sleeping in an airport or bus station. Your paranoia may vary.
4. Don't panic
   This helpful advice came from the US Customs official who checked my visa exemption form in Cincinnati, after the other official herding us into queues had announced that no flights had been leaving the airport for the last 2 days due to snow, and when asked what the purpose of my visit to the USA was I'd replied "well, I'm supposed to be flying from Seattle to my parents' city in Canada later today..." Indeed, panicking is much less useful than a hat and sleeping pills.
5. Don't believe the departure screens
   After clearing customs, the screens said my flight to Seattle was still scheduled for a timely take-off. The screens lied.
6. If you can't get on the plane you want, get on one that gets you somewhere closer to it
   This is obvious, but when there are no further flights going where you want to go for the next two days, and it's late in the night of December 23rd and you really want to get home for Christmas, it's worth asking the check-in agent if they can put you on another flight that gets you within a reasonable bus ride of your destination. I am extremely grateful to the Alaska Airlines agent who got me on the flight to Vancouver, and who protected my return flight despite the change of itinerary.
7. To get off the plane quickly, cover your face and fake a nosebleed
   Sadly, by the time my delayed flight to Vancouver had landed, the overnight bus to Kelowna was already en route and I was in no hurry, already mentally braced to sleep in the airport if I couldn't get on a flight with Westjet or Air Canada (I couldn't, as it turns out -- the Westjet agent kindly suggested that it was less dodgy to sleep at the airport than the bus station and that the area between the domestic and international terminals had the most comfortable benches). But another unlucky traveller was trying to get off the plane more quickly because they were holding the airport shuttle to Whistler for her. The guy sitting next to me let her go ahead of him in the aisle, but the people in front of us were unsympathetic, so he suggested the nosebleed tactic: "no one wants to get blood on them. It works every time."

I hope you had a good Christmas, if you celebrate it, and that you're well rested with warm ears.
- posted by Christina @ 2:20 pm 2 comments

 
Being the super fantastic
I've graduated. Or rather, I've been presented to the director of the LSE, with my last name mispronounced but that doesn't really matter because, unlike when he was reading Grash's name, the O.R. department convenor didn't leave off the key "with Distinction" phrase after my name. So anyone who reads this, please be aware that Grash is the super fantastic and very distinctive and did an amazing job on the project she and John did at the British Red Cross. It's a horrible shame she didn't get the little transformation of facial expression from Howard Davies after he'd heard that before shaking her hand. At least she was wearing super fantastic shoes.*

There were four other departments presenting their students in the same ceremony, so LLM after LLM went across the stage before they got to our department. In his closing remarks, Davies said "I'm sure you're asking yourselves the same question I'm asking myself: Does the world really need so many lawyers? But then, they all seem to get jobs. Which can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your perspective." (or words to that effect) Given the set of ten key tasks to make the world a better, safer, more equitable place Professor Margot Light set us in her opening speech, I reckon the lawyers have lots to do.

My brother said the ceremony made him less keen to attend his (or to do a postgraduate degree? He'll correct me if I'm wrong.) but the PhD robes and puffy caps made me eager to get even more overedumacated. The hats in particular are super fantastic.

It's not clear to me if I'd already graduated before this when they sent our transcripts, or if that's not official until January when they send our diplomas. Details, whatever.

Anyway, it was a lot of pomp and circumstance and getting photos taken and filling in forms and picking up gowns and wearing caps (but not during the ceremony since it wasn't a graduation) for 10 seconds of walking across a stage. Afterwards, though, there was a reception with sandwiches and mince tarts and champagne. We liked the champagne. We especially liked the mince tarts with the brandy cream. Yum, we said. Several times. There was also mingling and catching up with classmates and professors, so all in all, a very good, very super fantastic, very tiring experience.


*If you didn't check out that earlier link, Manolo's shoe blog is the funny.

[edited 5 January 2005 to add photos and the Howard Davies and Red Cross links]
- posted by Christina @ 8:50 pm 0 comments