Day 47: A little rear vision

Day 47 (21 Jan) Mondays always come around far too quickly. No sooner has one finished catching up with work over the weekend and feeling ready to relax than Monday's alarm goes off, or the sun comes up or something says: 'Monday!' That's today. Oh yes, the bike riding starts today...seemed like such a good idea yesterday. 

Awoke to hear of another interesting quirk of the US Presidency: President Obama was sworn in today, not with the usual parade-like inauguration flourish but with a brief 30 second swearing in ceremony in the White House. Turns out, the president must be sworn in on 20 January, but given it is a Sunday this year, the big inauguration must wait until tomorrow. More puzzlements about US ceremony to ponder on the way to work. 

Well, I hope it doesn't rain on his parade tomorrow (Monday in the US), which is what much of Brisbane awoke to this morning. Not a lot, but just enough. This time two years ago, we were flood-bound through the city...such is the weather. Now we want the rain, really badly. What would we do without the weather as a topic of conversation, an 'ice-breaker', a blog topic?  The weather holds a similar place in Japanese conversation too...one can spend a lot of time talking about the weather. 

Breakfast, at 6.12am

At 6.12am, with a drive up the coast ahead, in the rain, I was getting breakfast listening to the AM program. Getting breakfast, thinking about what to make for lunch, wondering if 350 photos of making breakfast is going to be any more or less boring than 350 photos of exercise biking? Maybe I should go out for a walk every morning at 6.00? Who knows, but this is what I do. There is *some* variation in the fruit at least. 

Work today includes a two-hour meeting about...something. It's interesting following on from a weekend discussion about the academic profession more generally and the increase in the number of meetings, usually to tell us how to be better...award-winnning, grant-winning, prize-winning people when really, we'd rather be writing. Still, colleagues are beginning to return from leave now so there's always some interesting chats in the corridor. 

University offers for students too mean new students coming to the university, many for the first time...and lots of questions and enquiries. I might get time to eat that lunch I prepared earlier. 

An earlier than usual return this evening, hopefully the Monday evening rehearsal routine will commence again soon, that was the plan at least. After dropping off a colleague at her car, at 6.12pm, I was about to reverse out of the car park to continue the trip home. I guess it makes a change from the office scene...

As I think about what's ahead, I guess there's a little looking back as well...glancing in the rear vision mirror, occasionally, helps.