City rocks with strimmer

One of those "Eats shoots and leaves" type statements... Without being spectacular, my morning and evening walks between home and work offer a substantial number of blip opportunities which I will be tapping - weather permitting - over the coming months. Here is one of the many rocky outcrops right in the city centre, highlighting just how thin the soil covering must be in most places (and also how tough it must be to build in most places!).

Interesting day, in which I managed to get my library card activated (readers from the University of Edinburgh will be interested to hear that there is definitely something our university does better, in getting the HR, IT and Library systems all talking to each other so that one "card activation" once you have your employment contract or student registration is sufficient, whereas here I have had to go through multiple processes, each requiring me separately to prove my identity with my passport) and then later enjoyed a discussion with my office next door neighbour during our first "cakes'n'coffee" session at the HCAS. My discussions with her revealed dual citizenships and layers of identity for her and the rest of her family which very much spoke to my research, offering the human angle on the institutional issues that preoccupy me.

Rather than worry about the fact that there are still a million things I don't know how to do, I've now diarised them one day at a time, so that I gradually conquer the whole mountain.

A slightly different route home proved to be (a) shorter, (b) flatter and (c) full of untapped blip potential. Watch this space.