Wow - I can't believe it's been over a month since I last updated - sorry! Life has been fairly hectic and I've finally found some time while back at home to let you all know what has happened the past 5 weeks or so.I left off just before thanksgiving - which was pretty amazing! The food was great, as was the company and it felt like a really special day. Getting to West Chester was easy enough, and I even had a chance to catch some of the Macy's Parade - I've put up photos on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidjohnwilson
Arriving we headed to Susan's house and after a glass of wine we tucked into dinner. The spread was massive - turkey, sweet potato mash, roast potatoes, brussel sprouts, yams (still not entirely sure what they are), stuffing, tomatoes and caesar salad! It all tasted fantastic and on commenting about this I made my first faux pas of the day - it went something like this:
Me: "Susan, the stuffing is fantastic! Do you mind if I ask what is in it?"
Susan: "David, honey, I work full-time and own a law firm; you'll have to ask the take-out menu..."
Needless to say I was a little embarrassed, and things didn't improve when I then asked about Christmas traditions:
Me: "So if you have a big turkey dinner for Thanksgiving, what do you eat for Christmas dinner?"
Susan: "We have chinese take-out... We're Jewish..."
Luckily Susan laughed off me putting my foot in it and we all headed to the banks of the Hudson to watch the sunset - simply stunning.
With Thanksgiving over I still had 3 days of vacation before lectures resumed so on the Friday I headed in to New York for "Black Friday" - the US equivalent of the Boxing Day Sales. I personally think it's a great idea - having the sales in November means that you can get some bargains for Christmas presents, instead of finding the presents at half price the day after giving them away! New York was crazily busy but I met up with Dana which was lovely and I also managed to get myself a classical guitar in the sales which was even better!
It was then back to the grindstone that is trying to get a PhD in math - not all that fun but I also made sure that even though I was working hard, I was playing hard too! The next few weeks were filled with KEEN and training - I was in New York most weekends for KEEN and then training 6 days a week - 2 days cycling, 2 days running and 2 days hitting the gym.
The fitness stuff has been really great - it has been a good stress reliever and I've been losing weight - currently I've lost 25.4lbs and only 10.6lbs to go for my target weight. I want to be a bit lighter and slimmer for the cycling season; after all, if I'm going to lug my big fat behind round a course for an hour or two, I may as well make it as light as possible!
(OK - so I lied. I didn't have time to finish this off back home so I'm back in NJ now :P)
As part of my fitness drive I've done something impulsive (and rather reckless) and signed up for my first ever triathlon! It's Olympic length (1.5km swim, 23.5mi bike, 10km run), is the New Jersey State Triathlon and at the moment I'm alternating between being really excited and really scared. It's being held on my birthday (25th July) so I reckon I've got plenty time to train(!) so hopefully I'll at least be able to finish... Those of you who have ever been swimming with me will know I've got quite a bit to work on - at the moment whenever I breathe out underwater I can't help but breathe in straight after; not so good when you're swimming in a lake! I'm going to be raising money for two charities by completing the triathlon - both close to my heart. In the US I'll be raising dollars for KEEN New York (http://www.keennewyork.org) while back home I'll be raising pounds for the MND Association who helped my granda with his, ultimately fatal, fight with this horrible disease (http://www.mndassociation.org).
To help with the fundraising I have decided to offer an incentive for people sponsoring me - if people sponsor me over a certain amount (probably £5 and $10) then they will get entered into a prize draw for some goodies! To that end I've been contacting celebrities, authors, athletes and others to get some signed stuff to giveaway. So far I've got a signed book from Terry Pratchett, signed game from PopCap Games and signed photo from Sir Steve Redgrave! If you have any ideas of people to contact (or if you know anyone who might be interested in donating personally) then please get in touch! You can either leave a comment or email me on davidjwi@math.rutgers.edu and I should get it.
Finally, the end of term came around - unfortunately bringing Finals with it. Finals sucked big time, but at the end of the day they were only for a week and although the 50min oral exam was possibly the worst exam I've ever done, I survived... And straight after my final exam on the Friday I headed into NYC for a documentary screening with Fulbright. The documentary is called "From Mambo to Hip-Hop: A South Bronx Tale" by Henri Chalfant and is a fantastic watch! It's even better when followed by a question and answer session with the director, producer and two of the people featured - absolutely fascinating stories and I learnt a lot about an area of New York I was pretty ignorant about beforehand.
That night I got back to the flat at around 3am and started to pack. At around 3.05am I realised that I really shouldn't have left packing until the night before the flight. At around 4am I hadn't really done much except move a load of stuff around my room in a vain attempt to pretend to pack. By 5am I had filled a hand luggage bag and decided this was enough effort for the night so went to sleep - only problem was I had stripped my bed to wash the bed clothes but hadn't had time resulting in me sleeping fully dressed on my lovely plastic mattress. Waking at 8am I carried on my 'packing' and by 11am I had more or less got everything I wanted to take home laid out. At 11 I headed to New Brunswick to get my hair cut so that dad wouldn't moan when I got home that I looked like a scruff, and went to meet up with Tarek for lunch - except unsurprisingly he had slept in... At about 1pm I headed back to the flat, I quickly finished packing and noticed it had started to snow - "how pretty!" I thought. By around 4pm there was a veritable blizzard outside and I decided to head to the train station an hour earlier than planned in case it got worse. Good idea. I rang for a taxi at 4 and it arrived at 4.30. By this point I was fairly peeved that it had taken so long - but bundled my bags in the boot anyway, while the blizzard tried to turn me into a pretty impressive yeti lookalike. I soon found out why the taxi was late when it took us 30 minutes to travel a usually 5 minute drive. The roads were horrific - Route 18 (a 3-lane motorway) had seen no sign of grit so we crawled at a paltry 5mph while the back end of the taxi slipped and slided its way to the train station.
Thankfully the train journey was uneventful - if only the same could have been said at the airport! It started as I queued to drop my bags off at the express check-in. I was two from the front and idly waiting for the passengers in front to get a move on when I glanced at the sign regarding what you could take in your hand luggage. I've seen this sign countless times and could pretty much recite it by heart but was nevertheless reading it to pass the time. When it came to the liquids section a sudden realisation hit me and my stomach immediately felt like it had been sucked into a black hole...
I had been Christmas shopping in New York a couple of weeks earlier and got all my family's presents so I wouldn't have the stress when I got back to the UK. For Sam, James' girlfriend, I had got a very nice Molton Brown selection box thing - with six different bubble baths, body washes, body cremes and other things I wasn't really sure what you did with (needless to say when the man in the shop asked me what I wanted in the box I told him I didn't have a clue and for him to pick out some "nice smelly stuff"). Now as I didn't really trust BA to get me and my luggage to the same destination I had decided to put all my Christmas presents in my hand luggage - including Sam's... With the sudden realisation that security would not appreciate about 1.5l of good quality bubble bath in my hand luggage I raced to the back of the line with my cases, flung them open on the floor in the middle of Newark airport and proceeded to pack my hand luggage with dirty gym kit and underwear to make space for the present in my hold luggage. The crisis averted I checked in my bags and proceeded to the departure lounge for a much needed cup of tea.
I thought that would be the end of my transport issues, however, arriving at the departure gate I noticed that my plane was already scheduled to be 30 minutes delayed - no big deal, I had experienced much worse in the past. Rather suprisingly, we all got onto the board at the scheduled time and were sat in our seats with only a 40 minute delay or so. Then the captain came on the intercom - "Excuse me, but we have a rather large amount of snow on the plane that has frozen so we will be needing to de-ice the plane before take off. This will take approximately 30 minutes after which we should be good to go." 30 minutes - again not a huge deal, so I sat patiently reading my book while a mechanised robot (looking surprisingly like a gangly version of WALL-E) sprayed the plane with industrial strength de-icer (which, for the record, smells exactly like celery..). So after a little over an hour the captain comes on the tannoy again - "Excuse me, but it appears that while waiting for our flight slot the plane has re-frozen and will need to be de-iced again. Sorry for the delay."
Now I don't know about you, but I certainly don't want to be told that the plane I'm sat in has a rather inconvenient habit of freezing when we are about to head up into the ridiculously cold air 35000ft above us. An hour later the captain comes back on the tannoy to inform us - "Once again the plane has refrozen, however I have been assured that once we are de-iced we will be able to take off immediately" - this I found out later was probably because we were one of only 6 planes to take off after 9pm from Newark - bloody snow! Finally - after nearly 3 hours sat on the plane with no entertainment or refreshments - we managed to take off and proceeded to hit some major turbulence heading through the snow clouds. Once above the cloud level it levelled off and we were served dinner.
Now I'm pretty sure turbulence has something in for me - whenever I'm on a turbulent flight the turbulence seems to subside about an hour in and then wait until I'm just about to take a bite of my scalding hot, unidentifiable-meat based flight dinner and then proceed to spend the next 30 minutes trying its best to cover my lap with beef hot pot. The bumpiness continued while we crossed Canada and Greenland (thank go I don't like drinking tea on a plane) before finally settling down while we crossed the Atlantic.
We finally touched down at Heathrow about 3 hours delayed and after another bout of security I finally boarded my Newcastle flight and was nearly home. The views were incredible as we flew up the East Coast - everything was a winter wonderland - and it was getting whiter and whiter the more north we got. Touching down in Newcastle I was greeted by big hugs from mum and dad and promptly fell asleep during the car journey home...
That's it for Part 1 - tune in to part 2 for loads of celebrations - Christmas, Hogmanay and a very special engagement!
Looking forward to Part II
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