as is usual on friday evenings, if anything is ever usual in my life, i went to aikido and then to join the physics round table. this was not to happen before i had called a friend from the dojo's shower because his number showed up on my missed calls list while the phone was on silent during training. this was confusing for all, first he had not called me, and i had looked too quickly at the list and missed the fact that said missed call was from earlier in the week... imagine... a phone call from the shower! ok, i was not under the running water and there were no other women in training yesterday.
then after the shower there was the dinner conversant at that totally uncool restaurant near the university. yesterday there was a rare appearance from one of the professors in the physics faculty. the oddest thing is that neither he or i can remember, but the likelihood is rather high that he was one of my examiners for the doctoral exam. clearly, if he was the one, i was neither brilliant, nor a total catastrophe in my exam. if there are notes given, i never bothered to find out, i was just interested in the overall result. for the life of me, we could not figure out who else could have been my second examiner. we did the usual thing, we went through a few well known physics names whom some of us have in one way experienced directly... hey, i still had the pleasure of personally knowing Hans Bethe. there is nothing like a bit of name dropping, and even i, to my disappointment, am not immune to playing the game.
"o som da viola de S. Miguel"
so, here i am listening to an internet broadcast of the RDP Açores. it is a blast! i love the sounds of the various string instruments that they are so fond of playing in the Azores, but i am even much more delighted in listening to the local azorean accent, specially the "u" gets pronounced in a way that sounds to my ignorant ears like the turkish "ü" which for the life of me i can not pronounce. but then pronunciation is not my forte, and i manage to make myself understood, and my diction is not even bad, but my accent in any language eludes all.
"uma no cravo, outra na ferradura"
it is one huge leap from the world of international physics to the azorean programmation on the internet radio, something that i find totally delightful. as far as i can remember i have been in the Azores once, and that was when the flights between New York and Lisbon often stopped in the Azores for refueling and passengers. however now one of my favorite cousins, and only have favorite cousins, is in Terceira working in a civil engineering project, so I am seduced by the idea of going to spend a few days visiting my cousin in the middle of the Atlantic. listening to the local sender is one way of getting in the mood for the voyage.
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