…::: NJ Brideau :::…

feels (more) like home

Having to go into the lab once or twice each day on the weekend to take care of precious cells really puts a damper on any travel plans.  We have a mental list of places to visit, and fortunately some of those places are right here in Oxford.  Unfortunately, lab schedules never really cooperate with recreational plans, so we can’t really even block off solid hours during the day to check stuff out yet.  As a compromise, we have decided to at least take one short trip per weekend to explore a new neighborhood (we want to move our of our flat).  As a bonus, we have managed to couple these trips with additional errands as well.

One of the major differences we initially had to adjust to was grocery stores.  All of the stores around us are quite small, and expensive.  We are fortunate to have three different chains within 1.0 mile, but unfortunate in that we usually need to go to all three just to get our week’s worth of groceries.  One problem is selection, and the other is price.  The prices really get me actually, because something I would recognize as costing $5 in the USA, is £5 here.  That would be fine if we were getting paid the NIH minimum postdoctoral salary in pounds – but this is not the case.  As a result of the exchange rate (£1=$1.6), we spend a lot of money on groceries.

I have been keeping track of all money in and out during our time here, and have plotted our weekly grocery expenses above.  “Groceries” aren’t limited to only food items, they include trips to the pharmacy, booze store etc.  The really high weeks are when I decided we needed liters of Bombay Sapphire and Makers Mark to go with our 6 bottles of wine or when we needed to stock up essential toiletry items – basic startup costs.  As you can see, the trendline indicates that our spending is decreasing, and hopefully it continues to do so.

There are a few large chains of grocery stores here (one owned by Walmart even) but the Sainsbury’s just North in Kidlington is the most convenient to get to by bus, so last weekend we decided to check it out.  Yes our big weekend plans consisted of checking out a big grocery store.  Well, I’m glad we did.  This is what I would consider a “proper supermarket”, equivalent in size and selection to most US grocery stores.  We even managed to buy everything we needed except aubergine.  I don’t think the words here have done justice to how happy I was to discover this store.  Thinking about it again actually,  our shopping experiences here in Oxford probably aren’t unlike what they are like in any big city.  There are “local” versions of stores, but they are small and expensive.  It takes a trip out to the outskirts of the city in order to find the bigger stores.  One life lesson learned.

This weekend for our big trip, we decided to venture into Headington and check out the Homebase store.  Homebase is the UK equivalent of Home Depot that was -oddly enough- started by Sainsbury’s a number of years ago.  Of course the store we visited wasn’t quite as big as any Home Depot I have been in, but it was nice to know there is a store with tools etc.  It was also nice to know that we didn’t buy a house here to work on.  The prices of DIY work here in the UK seems prohibitively high.

While at Homebase we picked up a really basic tool kit that should hopefully cover any sort of work we would need to do as renters, nothing like what we did before.  In fact, I already used it to give my bike some new cables and a tune-up.  Now that we have a go-to big grocery store, and have some tools at our disposal, we certainly feel more at home in this strange land.

How about them Olympics?

Were you like many around the world captivated by the winter Olympics the previous two weeks?  Unfortunately for Chelsea and me, Vancouver is 8 hour behind us, so many of the events were past our bedtime.  Fortunately for us however, the schedule of events is scattered throughout the day – not just in primetime -  and we got to catch an event or two.

Another barrier to us watching Olympic coverage was the fact that we don’t have a TV signal here.  Additionally, because of some sort of international broadcast rule, we were barred from online coverage by NBC and CBC.  Although based on the Facebook and Twitter updates of many, this was a blessing in disguise.  I didn’t figure out until the last week that the BBC had really good live broadcasts of many of the events online.  I just looked up the URL and then plugged my laptop into our home cinema system, and we were all set.  Below, are two examples of the good coverage.

My favorite sport:

And my favorite player from my favorite sport, (and also Chelsea’s boyfriend).  Bonus points if you can guess who it is.

Overall, I was impressed with the hockey coverage.  The picture was clear enough for me to follow the puck, and the image and audio were rarely not in sync.  I find it pretty amazing that the BBC would be able to broadcast a game being played live on the other side of the world, to a quality that looks and sounds good when put on our 80 inch wall-screen.  However, much like the Super bowl, we were subjected to BBC commentators.  To categorize these folks as “good” would be a compliment.  I wish I could remember the phrases that got us to crack up, but my short term memory is flooded with X chromosome inactivation literature.

Hockey is basically the only sport that I get excited about with the winter Olympics.  However, this feeling is not the same with the summer games, which luckily for us will be an hour away in two years.

How does everyone else feel?  Did you watch the games?  What are your favorite events?  Do you understand curling?

rough and tough like leather

One of the things I thought I would miss the most in our new home is American sports.  To be honest, I haven’t really had the chance to watch much in the way of sports the past year or so, but I could at least keep up with them in real time.  Now that we are five to eight hours ahead most of the games I want to pay attention to occur past my bedtime.  On the positive side, I don’t lose another year of my life watching my Spartans choke away the Big Ten championship, and I get to learn new sports.

Rugby is the perfect example.  RBS Six Nations championship going on right now, and it has captivated many fans,  including me.  I don’t really have an allegiance to any of the six teams, but the matches are fun to watch.  Plus I get to make jokes about how NFL football players would eat these guys for lunch.  But after watching a match yesterday, I’m not so sure about that, so I thought I would leave it up to the readers here at njbrideau.com.

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I chose the word “rough” because I would consider many sports “tough”.  I think each of the sports in the poll has their own reason to be the toughest.  If being judged on sheer brutality, go with MMA, but if you voted based on the number of injuries, probably American football would be the choice.  Hockey is the fastest, and includes weapons other than your body parts, and rugby is a brutal combination with basically no protective gear.

So what do you think?  Drop me a line in the comments justifying your vote if you want, or maybe even suggesting a different sport.  As for me?  Hockey.  I likely voted this because I played hockey almost my entire life, despise MMA, never really played American football, and think rugby players just get dirty.

reduce, reuse, and recycle

These three words, in this order are permanently stuck in my head, which I suppose is a good thing.  I can’t actually remember when these words became part of popular culture, maybe because it happened before I could remember.  As a kid, I remember taking bottles and cans back to the store, mostly for the 10 cent Michigan deposit, but it proves we recycled.  I also remember organizing the recycling for my parents in the garage before we put it out bi-weekly.  I’m curious if anyone older than me (Mom and Dad?) can remember when recycling started to catch on.

Here in Oxford they take their recycling very seriously.  Our recycling makes its way into two color-coded bins depending on the item, which eventually make it to the curb on alternating weeks.  The concept of recycling plastic, glass, and paper isn’t new to us, but I find that both Chelsea and I make an effort to recycle as much as we can – even if it involves disassembling various packages and containers.

And here is yet another recycling container.  Quickly, can you guess what it is for?  Well, it is meant for food scraps.  Oxford City Council has decided to recycle food into what I can only guess is a giant compost pile somewhere.  Pictured above is our little kitchen caddy, lined with a starch bag.  We have a larger container outside that makes its way to the curb every other week.

It took the two of us a little while to get used to putting all of our food scraps into this container, but I think it is really working well.  We found that we have much less trash that needs to go out because the food waste has its own container.  I’m sure many of you already have your own kitchen compost, but I’m happy to see a city embrace the possibility, and would not be surprised to hear that this is happening in more “green” and progressive cities in the USA.

And now for a perfect segue into the real reason for my post – reusable grocery bags.  One of the many differences Chels and I have adapted to here in the UK is bringing our own grocery bags to the store every week.  It isn’t required, but if you want to use the plastic bags the store provides, it costs 5 pence per bag.  Not a prohibitive cost, but it is just as easy for us to bring a couple cloth bags and our backpacks for the mile walk home from the store.  This concept isn’t new here in Europe – my parents remember doing the same right here in Oxford 30 years ago.

The idea also isn’t entirely new to the USA either.  In the last year, we both noticed many more people using reusable shopping bags at stores in Ithaca.  I only bring this up  because of a news article I read earlier this week. Apparently in Washington D.C., shoppers are being charged 5 cents per plastic bag if they choose to use them.  And apparently, not all people are on board with the change.  I encourage you to read the article linked above to fully appreciate why it made me so upset.

I don’t think everyone should be forced to use their own bags.  In fact, we will likely use plastic bags every so often in order to have something to scoop soiled cat litter in for disposal.  But I also don’t think those people that elect to use plastic bags should be upset at the minimal fee they are being charged.

Economically it doesn’t really make sense.  If one plastic bag costs 5 cents, and the reusable bag costs $1, and each bag can hold a similar volume of product, then one would need 20 trips to the grocer to get your money’s worth of that reusable bag.  And then the question remains whether the cloth bag is built to carry 20 trips worth of groceries.  I certainly hope so.

What does everyone think?  Should Americans continue to embrace the push toward sustainability and start providing their own bags at the store?  Do you use reusable bags?  Is 5 cents an unreasonable fee for a plastic bag?  Do the merchants that sell groceries have a duty to provide the consumer with something to carry them home in?

Do you tweet?

And by tweet I am referring to the ubiquitous social networking site Twitter.  With so many social networking sites to choose from, (Bookface, Myspace, LinkedIn, blah, blah, blah) I didn’t quite grasp tweeting.  About two months ago, I figured that I was pretty much the only person NOT on Twitter, so I joined.

You can follow me at http://www.twitter.com/njbrideau.  I started using the service as a way to track all the funny foods our cat ate.  Then I forgot about it for a while, and when I wanted to add peanut butter to the list, I found out that the messages are frequently purged from their servers.  Truthfully, even though I consider myself an early adopter of technology related items, I still do not understand Twitter.

I have managed to find twitter feeds for many athletes, celebrities, news channels, writers, and friends, and their posts serve to create a nice distraction now and again from my daily routine.  It must be a big deal, which is why Facebook changed their system to include “news feed” a while back, and why Google trotted out the failed “Google Buzz” tool recently.  Even Mark Cuban, a man who has made a fortune on internet and technology related businesses, loves the potential news sharing aspect of Twitter.

So does it work for news?  Last week I decided to find out.

Unless you were living under a rock last week, you know that Tiger Woods spoke to a close group of friends (and anyone within reach of a TV or computer) for the first time since his Thanksgiving adventure.  Regardless of you opinion of the man or his actions you have to admit, this was a huge story.  To quote one of my favorite sports writers Bill Simmons: “There isn’t another athlete — not one — who could have made the world stop from 11 to 11:15 like Tiger Woods did.”

I believe one of the major reasons this story became so big was because of the internet and social networking sites like Twitter.  Imagine if OJ Simpson had done what he did today?  The internet might have exploded.  So to test my theory, I decided to type “Tiger” into the search box of Twitter during his speech, and find out what happened.

What happened is beyond what I expected.  I typed in “Tiger” and a list of other people’s tweets popped up below.  Then I got the notice you see above, that 1,342 more tweets had occurred since I started searching — just 30 seconds earlier.  During the middle of his speech, I would estimate the tweets with the term “tiger” at ~4000 per minute, or 66 per second.

Are other of the so-called trending topics on twitter this popular.  Probably.  What does it mean?  I have no idea.  Most of my tweets are just duplicates of my facebook status.  Anyone else use Twitter?  What are your opinions?  What are your call signs/names?