Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Curly-tailed Lizards and Other Miami Sights

Rachel worked at the student center this morning. I walked down to Target to see if I could find a new pair of sneakers. I walked around the store twice and didn't see shoes and concluded that they didn't sell shoes at Target. I walked home. I was mostly in it for the exercise, so all good. Along the way I listened to the first episode of the Serial podcast. This season is spent entirely in the Cleveland court house following the more mundane aspects of criminal prosecution there. It was really good. I'll definitely keep listening.

When I reported my failure to find shoes at Target Rachel assured me there were shoes in Target because she went with Shubham once to buy sneakers there. I think I'll just see what there is in Utah this weekend.

***

Rachel came home for lunch and we had bean burritos again. I could probably eat them every day, so worked for me. After lunch, we walked to campus and found a nice place on the shady patio at the student center to "work". Some work happened, lots of people watching happened. This is a regular place for Rachel:
After a couple of hours, Rachel's laptop needed power, so we hunted around for an indoor place to work. We didn't find anything, but there were a couple of nice views of campus:

Also, on Wed there's a nice collection of food vendors in a temporary market on campus. A lot like Walla Walla's food truck gatherings. This fruit vendor's space was amazing:
Still looking for an indoor place to work, Rachel led me to her grad school office. There I met Gina, the administrative director of Rachel's program, and an avid cycling fan. We talked about the recently concluded Vuelta a Espana and the upcoming World Cycling Championships. Next, I met "Deshane" (not sure about the spelling), a grad student from Sri Lanka in Rachel's program. She'll be returning to Sri Lanka for a two-year period of data gathering about "road kill". In other words, she's interested in quantifying the effects of roads and other barriers to animal movement in Sri Lanka. She's also interested in approaches to mitigating those barriers. After her two years there, she will return to Miami and wrap up her PhD.

I'd like to say we got a lot of work done in Rachel's office, but between talking to Gina and Deshane, not much work really happened.

We walked back to Rachel's house and then on to a Mediterranean restaurant for dinner and then to the nitrogen ice-cream place for dessert.

Back at Rachel's now doing laundry and preparing to fly to Utah tomorrow for the conference.