Week #6: A few outings and a big run on the coast

Week 6 has come and gone and the fun never stops here!

Cryptography: We had a special guest speaker on Tuesday (see below) and then watched a great BBC special that Andy Ross recorded for me a while back on the Secret Codebreakers. It tells the story of Bill Tutte and Tommy Flowers and I thought it was really well done. Then, we reviewed a bit for our midterm and the students turned in their first papers. FUN!

Applied Stats: Students did a peer review of project 1. We learned about tests for normality and homogeneity. Found stats had a few good things in it this week, but without the help of the internet, some students are struggling to find statistics in the world.

Monday: Stayed at home all day and worked. Then, went out and had dinner w/ Ed and some of his guests at the neighborhood tapas place, Meson Del Felipe. It's good. Not outstanding, but good. It's a bit noisy and crowded in there too and that's not always my style.

Tuesday: Ed's friend, George, came to visit my cryptography class to talk about his time doing special ops stuff for the US. All unclassified stuff, but I think the students enjoyed hearing his stories. It was nice to have a day's break from class prep for me too! After class, I stopped at a tea shop on my way home and then did some work until dinner. I took George and Ed to this great restaurant in Borough Market called Rabot 1745. Everything on the menu has cacao bean in it in some form. They even had roasted cacao beans (delicious) on the table and a cacao bean grinder in case you needed more chocolate on your food. A great meal! Took some nice night photos on my iPhone on my way home.

Menu and roasted cacao beans

Tuna tartare with cacao guac

Choc du Vin: chicken in a red wine chocolate sauce

Chocolate soup with meringue

Wednesday: Early AM run and then off to Art of the Brick, a Lego art exhibit by Nathan Sawaya. Amazing stuff. This is not Darth Vader made out of Legos. It's like real art...made out of Legos. My favorite part were his descriptions of his work. I took some pics of those too, because I think it helps to bring it all together.

Love this one...and its description below.

That night, Ed, George and I went to see if Lindsay Lohen could handle live theater at Speed the Plow. She was fine. The play was short and more than anything she just seemed like herself chatting with the other actors on stage. Maybe that's good...or maybe she didn't get into character enough. Not a disaster. Not spectacular.

Thursday: Awoke at 6AM to find my computer dead and my charger no longer working. The prongs had been falling out of the magnetic piece that connects to the machine for weeks, but I had always been able to put it back together, but not Thursday morning. AND all my work for class was on my dead machine. Brilliant. I made the only day-of appointment at a Genius Bar in London at some mall out in Zone 3 on the tube, so that was to be my afternoon. A student let me borrow a cord for class so I could get the assignments for the day off of there. Then, after a work meeting I headed out on my adventure. It was fun to be in a mall. I walked around a bit, but I had my MacBook and giant Stats book with me, so I needed a rest. Starbucks chai tea latte and a apple cinnamon duffin to the rescue. Then, it was time for my appointment. After waiting a while, a nice young man came over and saw my broken cord and looked and looked through my account info, but wasn't finding a way to replace my cord (I guess my laptop is too old). But, all of a sudden he went to the wall w/ the chargers, picked up a new one, opened it, gave me the new one and dumped my old one in the box and told me to be on my way. YAY! Free new power cord. So sweet that guy. :) Totally made my day.

Friday: Class, afternoon run, work.  Then, it was too nice out to stay inside and work, so I took a stroll to Chinatown, got some nice bubble tea and walked home. It was lovely.

Saturday: Borough Market in the AM. Had some coconut pancakes, so yummy tea (that I went back and bought a few backs of) and a sausage breakfast burger (sausage burger, fried egg, spinach, hollandaise sauce and a freshly baked bun!!). Then, I stopped at Waterloo station on my way home to pick up train tickets for next week's field trip to Bletchley. Yeah...I purchased 20+ train tickets for THIS Friday (as in the day before) and not NEXT Friday. I couldn't believe I had screwed that up. Thankfully, they are refundable tickets (minus a small refund fee), but still. I about had a panic attack in the train station. Ugh! Then, it was time to go to Bournemouth for the weekend. I took a 1PM bus and arrived in Bournemouth around 3:30. Walked about 1.5 miles to my hotel (which was ADORABLE!) and then explored Boscombe (the town my hotel was). Walked down to the beach and around this cute pier that has all these neat musical instruments on it (pipes and steel drums). Then, I walked up Sea Road and checked out some of the art along this street. I also saw the police box that was in the main shopping district. For the Doctor Who fans out there, this is one of only 2 functioning police boxes in the entire world apparently. Fancy. Then, it was back to the hotel for rest and A&M football. The game wasn't great, so about halfway through I went and picked up some Thai take away. Yummy.

Sunday: Woke up early. Had a banana and some porridge that the hotel was nice enough to bring me Saturday night since I'd miss their breakfast. Walked a little over a mile to the race start. It was FREEZING (mid 30s). I wore a jacket there, but left it at baggage check. Got in my pin and was ready to go by 7:30. Race started at 8 and I had a great run! The feeling in my fingers came back around mile 4. There was a terrible hill around mile 8.5. Lots of great coastal views.  A few out and backs, but I didn't mind it because it was great scenery and it was fun to see runners coming towards me and then see runners behind me on my way back out. I ran the half in 2:11:59. A 23 minute improvement over my first half in Texas. Super happy with that and this one was sooo much easier. It also wasn't 90 degrees. :)

After the race, I took a bus back to the hotel and went out to do some shopping before roast started at 1PM. Bought a belt (my jeans are getting loose) and some new boots (the ones I brought are hurting my feet...the new ones are ugly, but functional...and cheap from Primark). Then, I went and had a cider and roast at a cute little pub called Chaplin's. I also got a free dessert w/ this card from my hotel. Lime cheesecake. It was yummy and I don't even like cheesecake. I dropped my things off at the hotel and took a nap. Then, it was off to do some mini-golf in the park and get my feet in the water at the beach. I also took a stroll up to another garden that overlooked the city below. Beautiful. Then, it was back to the hotel to figure out a dinner plan. I decided to eat at Urban Reef, a fancy place on the waterfront. Great choice to reward myself! Had baked camembert w/ honey, thyme, and fig preserve and some scallops cooked in salsa verde and this lovely glass of wine my waiter picked out for me. Just perfect. And, I was back to the hotel in time for Downton Abbey.

Monday morning I had my first official English Breakfast w/ tea, sausage, bacon, fried egg, baked beans, hashbrown, grilled tomato, and mushrooms. Yum! It was very nice. Then, came the bad stuff. It was raining. Ugh. The walk to the train station was about 30 minutes. The buses in Bournemouth/Boscombe are super confusing. They are owned by 3 different companies and the one that came by my hotel only came twice a day. :/ So, I decided to just do walk it. Bad move. I should have called a taxi. Anything really. I was so angry all the way there. Umbrella was useless because it was windy. My jacket kept me somewhat dry, but not really. My bag was soaked by the time I got to the train station. Just miserable. I missed my car. I missed warm, dry Texas. It was miserable. I was wet all the way home on the 2.5 hour bus ride until I made it back to the house. I immediately took a shower and had a cup of tea to warm up. Miserable. I'm pretty sure these blogs would be much less fun if London was having its typical rainy days. I am not a rain fan and I am very grateful it's been unusually dry this semester.

I got home and had a few hours to get some classwork done (got some feedback emailed out on papers and started my test writing for my 9AM Tuesday class). I did not accomplish both of those tasks before Steve, Reggie and I headed out for a TV taping, but it was fine. I got up at 5AM today and finished stuff. No biggie. It's London...who needs sleep!?! Steve had scored us tickets to Live at the Apollo (a British stand-up comedy TV show). It was great fun and we happen to get seats in the front row! They filmed two shows last night and so we got to see 6 comics total. They were all pretty good despite the fact that I usually don't get British humor. Good stuff, but we didn't really get home until midnight.