Cosmology, Kel's retreat and 'boy girl sex'

10/03 - Another cosmology lecture this morning. I was about 15 minutes late, by which point I had missed the intro and was greeted by 30 minutes of graphs. I understood a lot of it, and it was still good, but not as good as yesterday. Due to lack of choice (honest) I had steak and chips for lunch - way too many chips, no vegetables, overcooked steak. Yum. I feel I started some good work today, at one point having a Skype chat with Ben while having James on iChat, all talking about work stuff. I got the bus at 6 with Dan, but I skipped the all you can eat pizza in favour of an enormous salad, containing goat's cheese, chorizo, avocado, parmesan, sun dried tomato and rocket. All the good things.

Kelly rang and packed at me, as she is going to Austria on her lab retreat tomorrow - this may be great, but will probably be awful. We discussed plans for next weekend, and realised that we can just hire a car here (hopefully taking advantage of Zack's UN discount), and drive pretty much wherever we want in four days. So, this leaves us with some tough decisions to make - to stay with her stepsister in Slovenia? In her aunt's house near Carcassonne? Just drive to Venice/Bologna/Milan and hang out? I am looking forward to this adventure.

11/03 - Well, seems like I was right. Kelly texted me this morning to let me know a few things; firstly that the skilift leading to her accommodation shuts at 3 pm every day, meaning that she is trapped there from then until it opens at 9 in the morning. Secondly, easyjet lost her luggage, meaning she only has the clothes she wore on the plane, which is not much help as it is currently -1º in Innsbruck, which is 1500m below Kelly's mountaintop hideaway. Which is to say, I bet she's really cold. The lecture this morning was good, somehow he managed to fit the terms "boy girl sex" and "foreplay" into his account of the history of the Hubble constant.

The afternoon was odd - I started a few things and almost immediately dropped them, having massive problems concentrating on anything for any period of time. I drank large amounts of citron tea from the machine in my hall, and tried to learn some stuff about statistical analysis, but ended up reading loads of posts by Brian Cox about this ridiculous story. And informing people of the fact that this is actually fine, has been planned for ages, and amounts to no less physics time than if the accelerator ran on its old schedule, with summer and winter shutdowns.

I managed to get the 1801 bus again, and on my way back I realised it was Thursday, i.e. late opening day in Geneva, so I went along the fancy shopping street looking for stuff. However, it then started to snow quite heavily, so I took refuge in Globus and came out with a nice looking bottle of wine, before getting the tram to Planpalais so I could pick up a Mike Wong takeaway on my way home. After I tried to request a beef noodle soup with no coriander and extra chili in French, and just about succeeded, she then said "eat here or to go?" I felt silly. It was delicious though, I am slurping my way through the last dregs as I write this.

Rich is coming out tomorrow, until Tuesday - I am not 100% sure what to do with him. The main problem is tomorrow night, when I am meeting my cousins in Lausanne for the evening (they have been let off their strict Swiss reins for the night), and I could probably bring him along but no other people (he has met them before after all), but he may wish to stay in Geneva with the other people we know - I think the best way to deal with this may be just to ask him.