More travels

Categories: places

Tags: stress, photos, interviews, work, Sheffield

Date: 30 June 2012 14:09:17

This last week I was back in Sheffield for work, starting the interviews for the research project I'm working on. I stayed with lovely people from the Ship (including holly who used to blog here) and their two furry owners. As well as the interviews (which on the whole I thought went really well) I also managed to meet up with another shippie, Jengie, which was great, visit some of the gardens and galleries around the city centre, and make contact with an old school friend who now lives and works in Sheffield and, bizarrely, is the lead research governance person for my project! I may be going back there in a few weeks, so hopefully we will be able to meet up then, timetables permitting.

I ate a couple of times at a hippyish vegan cafe in the centre, which featured these clocks which really made me laugh:

[caption id="attachment_4235" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Yorkshire timezones"][/caption]

As mentioned, holly and JonoT are owned by a couple of furry brothers, Charlie and George. I was freaked out before I even met them as every photo I have ever seen of them has them with laser eyes, both staring in the same direction and convincing me I was going to have to don a tinfoil helmet every time I went indoors. They actually weren't that bad most of the time, although on my final evening I did have an audience while I was eating my tea which was a bit disconcerting:

[caption id="attachment_4236" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Charlie says "You will give me all your dinner now""][/caption]

The final interview was on Thursday evening, I had toyed with the idea of returning home straight after it but hadn't because I had worked out I would get home at some stupid small hour of Friday morning so it wasn't very practical. Which turned out to be a good decision given the rain/floods further north on Thursday afternoon/evening which meant that train travel anywhere up north was chaos, I was following several people's torturous journeys home on facebook and very glad that I wasn't having to go through that. On Friday morning when I did leave it was still bonkers, but at least it was daytime, and although I had to change a few times and it did take hours and hours and I wasn't well which didn't help, the train staff were all cheerful despite all the bonkersness that they must have been dealing with, and I am really happy to get home at last, though I struggled to stay awake till 8pm after a very long day.

Today the most exciting thing has been to buy some new pants (it must be an age thing, but I really like that satisfying feeling of knowing I'm going to be wearing nice new pants :D), and watch a gaggle of birds fighting on our bird feeder. And trying to ignore the length of the grass, which will bury the bird feeder from underneath if it's not cut soon.