Typical work morning

I'll try to give you a visual diary of my typical work day. First part is the morning. I get up—yup, it's dark in here with no windows. I've set up my iPhone on the night stand to act as my alarm clock. It's usually what I do when I travel, the iPhone charges and then wakes me up. After I get up, I put on my workout clothes and head out the door to the gym. I found out about this place during my advance web research. Google and google maps are really helpful tools for this sort of thing. I usually try to do this when I travel so that I get a sense for where a place is situated and what is in its proximity. So with the gym, I was happily surprised to find that it's just up the block from the apartment.

Above you see the main street that I cross on my way to the gym. It's Carrer de la Creu Coberta in the Hostafrancs district, with a metro stop of the same name. Pretty much right underneath my apartment is the Mercat d'Hostafrancs, one of a handful of these types of markets with fresh produce and meats. I pass by this market, then cross the main street then head up the narrow alley up to the gym.

That's the gym, pretty decent place actually. Where you see that domed roof is where the weights and aerobic machines are. There's a pool in there but I don't have my speedos here and I would also need a cap (I know not why, but those are the rules). I run in with my weight gloves and sweat towel. I do my "CBL" workout that I actually got from some weightlifting guy I met on a plane once. He said to spread out the body parts so that each gets rested, so C is for chest, B is for back, L for legs, and that's three days' worth. I finish off with shoulders and biceps/triceps and that's five days' worth and a full week. Each day I do "burpies" and aerobics, either jog on the treadmill or recumbent bike, each of these for 30 mins. The whole thing takes about an hour and by the end I'm awake :)

Once I get back from the gym, I make breakfast. Right now, that's ham on toast, OJ, coffee, and plain yogurt with honey. I catch up on the news (Drudgereport), down my coffe, and it's off to work. I'll write up the one-hour commute in my next post. But right now (Saturday night), it's time to head out to Plaza Catalunya and La Rambla to get some tapas and cervezas.

My digs in Barca

Here's my apartment in Barcelona, taken the day of arrival. It's a fairly roomy place with a somewhat cramped kitchen, which you can see to the right in the pic. In the pic you see the dining table (where I've since set up the laptop), with a "two-story" closet directly behind the table. It's somewhat strange: when you open the sliding doors, there are two levels, with the top level too high up to reach from the floor. Presumably, one is meant to use this from the loft above the table. There's a bed up there, but it only has about two feet of headroom which makes it a touch cloisterphobic. So I sleep on the "ground floor" where there was a kind of couch that could be opened up into a two-mattress (side-by-side) bed. There's a fan above, which is another reason why I chose that sleeping location. Overall the place isn't bad, it's location is excellent, but it's a bit dark with only one window. And currently, I can't really open the window up in the morning cause there are guys out there working on the scaffolding. I hadn't expected this scaffolding there, and hope that they finish up before I leave...there's a nice porch out there that I'd actually like to use.

My impression of the kitchen was initially somewhat low as it lacks a full-sized oven (although I knew about this when I rented the place, I just didn't think it would make such an impact in person). It does, however, have a small "desktop" oven (like a toaster oven) that actually works fairly well...I baked fresh cod in it a couple of days ago and it turned quite well. There's also a small baking pan that fits inside so I think I'll be able to make simple casseroles in there without too much trouble—so long as I can find all the ingredients. One major redeeming quality about the kitchen is that it came equipped with Bialetti coffee makers (there's three of them here—two small and one tiny). It's also equipped with other basic things that hopefully I won't need to add to. So far so good. The fridge is small, but also seems to suffice.

Here is the bathroom and laundry. The shower has pretty low pressure and is supplied by a small water tank shared with the washing machine. To the right of the washing machine you'll see "the dryer"—two clothes lines outside the sliding glass doors. The world's slowest dryer: it takes two days for stuff to dry. This poses a bit of a washing schedule challenge. It's best to string wet stuff up in the morning to maximize what little sun filters in back there. I think I have this figured out though: run the machine when I go off to lift weights at the gym. This takes me about 90 mins within which time the machine finished, especially when on the "Quick" setting. My first try I started the machine after my workout while I hopped in the shower. Not only did I get the hot/cold water fluctuations but I ended up waiting two hours for the washer to finish. I must have used the wrong setting, but still, I've never seen a washing machine pull so many cycles. I think the best approach with this machine is "early and often". Do laundry early in the day and don't let the clothes pile up.

My office building at UAB

I've had some issues with network connectivity, so thus far this is the only pic I've managed to upload (emailed from iPhone over wifi a couple of doors down from my office...never mind where I was :) Anyway, this is where I'm at, and should be pretty much every day for the duration. I saw on Facebook that an old college friend of mine is now living in Calgary. Which reminded me that I did a co-op semester there, happened to be during the 1988 Olympic winter games. And it struck me: being here in Barca is very similar to doing a co-op semester. Only 20 years later, ha ha :) Mind you, the co-op semester in Calgary would have been about 4 months, not just the one. I seem to have forgotten most of the details, however :) Gotta go catch the train back to town (about an hour commute each way). Tonight after dinner I'm going to head out to watch Barca v. Inter Milan—the semi-final match in the League of Champions. I'm told that around here everything stops when Barca plays. Which brings back another parallel memory: Barcelona, to me, is similar in many ways to Montreal. A large reason for that comparison is the cultural distinction the Catalans embrace as do the Quebecuois. Furthermore, Catalan, the language, is a kind of mixture of Spanish and French. So hearing them say "D'accord" for example, reminds me of Quebec. And the somewhat curious neural association (in my head) between Spanish and French (when I want to think and speak in Spanish, French bubbles up to the surface, it's really weird and somewhat annoying) also brings up the Montreal association. I feel like accenting everything I say with Tabarnacle! or one of my other favorites. I'll have to ask my friends here if they have their own colloquiusms.

Checking in on the sailboat

Proof that I visited the sailboat at least once this year. The boat needs some work, here are some TO DO items I want to tackle when I get back from Spain:

• new engine (maybe a Honda 9 HP, 4-stroke, electric start?)
• new battery (old one's dead)
• mooring line snubbers (get new ones or get rid of WestMarine ones?)
• solar fan (old one stopped working, this is a must!)
• oil lamp (I lost the glass for the current one, may as well replace it)

Those are the main things. Other than that, the boat needs cleaning and it needs its sails unfurled (undoubtedly a number of wasps have taken up residence). Other more long-range TO DO items include checking out the boat's electrical system, installing a wire bus (to clean up the wires), flexible antenna (replacing the car antenna that's in there now), putting in longer speaker cables, and installing the fan that's been sitting in a box for a few years now. I'd like to do more sailing this year, and split boating evenly between the sailboat and the motorboat so that Tippy II isn't used exclusively. Lake Keowee's nice and I'd like to take Pudgy out even if it's just for a barbeque lunch and some swimming.

Update at semester's end

This is the last week of spring semester classes and the last week I'm home before flying off to Barcelona for 6 weeks. I was hoping to clear off everything on my TODO list so that I could spend the entire month of April working on code that I want to use in Barcelona as well as with the next bunch of REU (Research Experience for Undergraduate) students that are going to be inhabiting my lab for 8 weeks this summer. But of course as soon as I had cleared my list, a whole pile of stuff suddenly rushed in to fill the void, mainly the writing of 2 papers and 2 proposals. One paper didn't get done, the second did, following a late night of writing till 3am (resulting in the paper's on-time submission and a cold that set in immediately thereafter :P ) The 2 proposals also went out on time, with the second of the two coming down to the wire as well. I have a third one I'm working on presently, but I'll have to fine-tune that one remotely. At left is me wrestling with hardware that isn't working properly, but that we need to get going for an existing grant we're working on. The pic kind of reminds me of the work I did as a grad student over 10 years ago! I hate to leave stuff like this in inoperable condition, but time's run out.

Meanwhile at home, I knocked off stuff I had to do around the house, including bug spraying the house exterior and crawlspace, getting the oil changed on the truck, and installing the second garage door opener. The latter and a gig at Backstreets consumed two of three free weekends I had at home after returning from Austin. I haven't had much time to update the blog with anything else and the only pic that I think I managed to capture was one afternoon when driving back in a thunderstorm. You can't really see it very well in the pic, but there were sheets of rain coming down. It was a welcome rain actually, washing off green layers of pollen that had accumulated in the days before. It was like driving through a badly needed carwash. I should probably wash the car again before I leave as it's starting to look green again. Maybe I'll do that today as I have to split early and get my haircut—I tried leaving that to the last minute so that I won't have to get another one until I get back home. When I return I will have 5 REU students waiting for me in the lab and I'll already be a week behind!