Working

Last Friday I started getting to know the group here at Purdue that is Inspire, the Institute for P-12 Engineering Research and Learning. On Monday was the full day of advisory board meetings which I attended so I could learn about Inspire. Now I have actual work to do for them. At the moment, of course, it is voluntary because I don't have a work permit yet. I have applied for one, but it could take up to 3 months to come back. Then, they want to offer me a post-doc position. That would be fabulous. Of course I would be happy just to do it, but I won't turn any offers down. At the moment I am working from home as it is qualitative data analysis. That is, words, not numbers, so it is new for me. I just have to think of the words as numbers. I should be right! Anyway, I have a very experienced qualitative analyst living here too, so I can always ask!

Doing this over the last few days has meant that I have not had much time for cats. I did try on Tuesday to find my way there by bus, but when I got into the central bus stop in Lafayette I could not find the right bus. The sign said that the number 6 buses stopped outside the depot centre on 2nd street. As I was on second street I tried to find the depot centre. Of course I couldn't and went back to the bus stop where I saw a 6B leave. I wanted the 6A. Then every other bus in existence turned up, but no 6A. So I got back on the 1B and went home. It was a big waste of time. At home I looked on the web and found that in the middle of the day, for about 3 hours, the 6A is only hourly. Every other bus is half hourly. Now I also suppose that it does stop at the central stop on 2nd street and that the sign is meant to confuse. I will have to try the journey again some time. At least I got to buy tokens, like a 10 trip pass, so each trip only costs 75 cents, not a dollar. When I get put onto the Purdue staff, (also students) I will get to travel for free. We are due to have the Prius again on Easter Saturday for a week or so.

Easter is only in one and a half weeks. Did you know that here, Good Friday is not a public holiday? It is supposed to be something to do with separation of religion and state. Of course then, Easter Monday is not a holiday either. In fact, most of the department is going to Chicago late Sunday to have workshops starting Monday. Llew is going up Tuesday and coming back Wednesday. Everyone has different days, so they are trying to work out car pooling. Meanwhile, while they are there, Jo arrives. He is actually in Chicago Monday night and will come down sometime. We have to work that out too. It's all a bit chaotic. I will just be staying here and working away!

Last night we went to dinner with a few people from the department at a restaurant called McGraw's. It is on the Wabash and it was flowing really fast. Downstream from there there is massive flooding. In Lafayette, the flood level for the Wabash is 11 feet and last Saturday it rose to 17 feet, but only the golf course and 1 road went under. I have never seen so much water moving so quickly. The funniest thing was, that while we were sitting there, three 8 person kayaks went past - upstream! Aaah. We are getting some bouncing round weather. It got warm and sunny for a while with 3 days over 80F but yesterday was rainy and after dinner it was 50F and windy. That felt cold again even though we have just come out of a few weeks at around 30F! We are just Queenslanders obviously craving warm weather and sunshine. We will just have to get ourselves out and about this weekend!