Research and fun.

This morning I was off to an early start. Alarm woke me up at 6am, which gave me lots of time to get ready and have breakfast and be out the door by 7:30am to catch the free shuttle to the train station. And then I transferred onto one of Stanford's free shuttle buses to get to campus, and was at the archives just a few minutes after it opened. Awesome.

I found some good material today, but spent a long time looking through boxes that contained nothing of interest. It's how it goes sometimes. I'm pretty sure now that I won't be able to get everything done before I fly home next week, but, again, it's how it goes. At least I will know what's here. This way, I'll have an excuse to come back! It's really a nice place to be this time of year. It's warm and bright and relatively empty. (The undergrads don't get back until late September.)

In the afternoon I took a break from researching to go to the campus museum---the Cantor Arts Center. Every Wednesday at 2pm there's a free tour of the center's Rodin collection. It was fun, and I even learned some interesting things. I'm glad I did that, though it did take me away from my work for an hour and a half. Oops.

Once the archives closed, I headed off to discover a bit more of the campus and eventually made my way to the postdoc BBQ that a friend of mine organized. She invited me along . . . and thanks to free wireless in the archives (and all over campus, I believe), I got her e-mail about it. And it was fun! The night ended with a drive home. Seriously, this research trip has been awesome so far. Free transportation, free food and drink, good company! And there's only more fun times to come, I'm sure of it.

Here's more images from the museum. It's lovely. You should go if you're ever at Stanford.Detail above the main doors.Part of the lobby.Deborah Butterfield, untitled, 1999. I saw a similar horse at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.Rodin's "The Kiss" and part of my tour group.

Oh, and P.S. Ottawa is apparently "the San Francisco of eastern Canada."