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Commuting…

Manuel Marques May 19, 2015 No Comments A photo a day , , , ,

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Yesterday as I was heading home I came across this scene – the sun was quite low in the horizon (~8:30 PM) and the last rays of sunlight of the day were streaming through the branches and hitting the tombstones in this churchyard (which I have covered extensively in the past). I slammed on the brakes of the bike and hurried to take a quick shot with the cameraphone (a shame I didn’t have the DSLR with me at the time, but that is quite an heavy beast to carry around! šŸ˜› ).

I will definitely miss this commute whenever I move out of Canterbury! (even in wintertime when it is dark and eerie, cycling by the churchyard with the tombstones illuminated by the blueish moonlight, it still has some appeal…)

Hello!

Manuel Marques May 18, 2015 No Comments A photo a day , , , ,

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This is the view I’m currently having outside my lab. Not the kind of thing you’ll want when you have delicate and very motion-susceptible interferometers right on the other side of the wall!

Thankfully this will not last long – they are just sorting out the access road which will be widened slightly and brought closer to our building. Although having cars passing by closer than before will also not be very good for us… oh well!

And another parkrun!

Manuel Marques May 16, 2015 No Comments A photo a day , , ,

CPR 16 May 2015

Already integrated in my Saturday morning routine, that’s for sure! Having a bit of fun and trying hard to get to that sub-20′ time (this week I’ve beat my previous best time, with 20:17. Still 17 seconds to shave out, but I’m hoping by the end of the Summer I’ve managed to do it!). Those last two hills are terrible… looking at my laps one can definitely see a big decrease in the split times for km 3 and 4!

Many thanks to all the volunteers who painstakingly show up every Saturday morning to help out in this event, marshalling the course and taking lots of lovely pictures with which I can fill up my Facebook albums! (I think people by now are quite tired of seeing photos of me running with varying degrees of brightly coloured running gear). I really need to give back, but at the same time I don’t want to give up a potentially great training session, it is a bit of a dilemma! šŸ™‚

And in this event I’ve met a few more familiar faces – one of my co-workers came to run the full course with his two under-10-year-old children. Slowly but steadily the “running-mania” is arriving in Canterbury and, more particularly, at our own Applied Optics Group. Beware… šŸ˜€

No way…

Manuel Marques May 15, 2015 No Comments A photo a day , , ,

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How was this possible?? I mean, I can understand how they fire all their “ammunition” over an unsuspecting car’s windscreen, but this window is perfectly vertical. They had to make a fly-by and aim properly at my office’s window. I feel like I’m being targeted… the kitchen window at home also had a few droppings.

Don’t know what I’ve done to you, birds! I even left some grass seed out for you to feast on! (the original intention was to make the garden look a bit greener, but anyway…)

Early bright mornings…

Manuel Marques May 13, 2015 No Comments A photo a day , , , , ,

This morning I was in for a treat – a bright mildish (not too warm, not too cold) morning with absolutely zero wind! Obviously I had to head out to the boathouse under these circumstances šŸ™‚ . By the time I got there (at about 06:30 AM) it was already very, very bright – it makes the dark days we have in Winter around here a bit more bearable when you know that by this time of the year it gets this nice! šŸ˜‰ .

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Look at the lack of rippling from the water – it is a perfect mirror! If it wasn’t for the frequent logs and bits of garden waste that are quite frequently present in the river it would have been an absolutely perfect training session this morning.

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(and yes, the HDR feature on my phone works really well, I have to say! No way I could ever get these images on a single frame acquisition…)

Farz breton!

Manuel Marques May 12, 2015 No Comments A photo a day , , , , ,

Farz breton!

Got this recipe from a work colleague for this typical dessert from Bretagne. Unfortunately it did not turn out the way I wanted as I used the wrong butter to line the tray (note to self: spreadable butter is NOT a good idea as it has oil in addition to the butter itself!) . Also, the tray I used was too thick – ended up leaving the thing to cook for twice as long as described in the recipe!

But it tasted all right in the end, and the ultimate test was to take it into the office and see how quickly it vanished – well, let’s say it passed with flying colours! šŸ™‚

Whitstable 10k (again…)

Manuel Marques May 12, 2015 No Comments Uncategorized , ,

You might have wondered why during the run described in a previous post I had a camera strapped to my forehead, cyborgue-like. The intention was to film the whole race to keep it as a nice memento for all of us to remember – unfortunately the small 4 GB card ran out of memory 200m away from the finish line! (I guess I was thinking we would finish in under 50 minutes… optimistic! šŸ™‚ )

Anyway, the lighting conditions were perfect and this time I managed to hold the camera quite well (read: not pointed at the sky during the whole race). Enjoy!
(hopefully you’ll not mind too much my constant remarks throughout the race… let’s say that a 5:00-5:30/km pace is clearly not enough to leave me breathless – to be honest I quite enjoyed not being completely dead by the end of the race!! šŸ˜‰ )

Election day!

Manuel Marques May 11, 2015 No Comments Uncategorized , , , ,

Polling
No photo of the day, hence I had to make do with something from Flickr… šŸ™‚

Last week it was Election Day! All over the UK people voted for the General and Local Elections, with the polling stations opening at 7 AM and closing late at night (10 PM). Definitely a few differences from back home, where the elections are always on a Sunday and there are a few weird historic laws regarding them (such as prohibiting people from hunting…). And, perhaps more interestingly, the local elections are open for participation not just to UK citizens but to anybody who is legally in the country, such as EU citizens.

The mechanics of the local elections are also quite strange, I have to say… you don’t vote for a specific candidate who might head the council for a few years; instead, you elect a few people of your sub-region (in my case it included a few of the villages nearby) who will between themselves (and the other elected councillors from other areas) decide who is heading the council. Due to that, things like the image below are simply not there, and I have to say that my local councillors did not actually campaign that much – I did get quite a few leaflets regarding the general election, though! (I’ll leave the general election for a future post…)

Sines
This is the kind of local elections you’d expect to find in Portugal. Gigantic billboards everywhere, and people campaigning for both councils and parishes. Here you wouldn’t know that a pre-election campaign was underway unless you consulted the relevant websites!

Perhaps not surprisingly, Canterbury maintained the Tory-dominated council from previous years. Actually, practically the whole of Kent is Tory-dominated, council- (and MP-) wise; apart from Thanet which now has a UKIP local council and Maidstone (Labour) , everything else got the Tories. And as for me, I can’t say I could make an informed choice regarding the local elections given that I had scarcely any information regarding the candidates or their manifestos. Very strange indeed!

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