Beware of the Train

wormwood_pearl and I just spent ( a weekend in Snowdonia with some climbing friends and their hardcore mates. )

* "Epic" appears to be climbing parlance for "expedition that did not go according to plan". In particular, epics need not involve serious injury, though that obviously makes for a better story.

The house is on fire, and so is the cat.

Yes, I am returned from Nova Scotia, after an only moderately ghastly trip. I flew out of Halifax at about 2130 local time, arrived in Heathrow at about 0830 local (or 0430 body time...), having seen the surprisingly enjoyable film Failure to Launch and not got any sleep; spent an hour lying on a bench in Heathrow with newspaper over my eyes while two flights to Glasgow took off without me; finally got on the (delayed) flight that I was booked into; slept for most of that; then was met at the airport by wormwood_pearl and went into Glasgow, where I was seized by a sudden urge to buy trousers. Now, normally I have to be physically dragged into clothes shops by teams of horses: this may give you some idea of the abnormality of my mental state by this point. Eight try-ons later, I came back to my senses, went home, and had a long lie-down.

[By the way: yes, I did bring wormwood_pearl back a Mountie (a sergeant, no less): watch my moblog for photos. But no, I didn't bring back any maple syrup, on the grounds that it can easily be obtained in Britain and I don't actually like the stuff. I'm still intrigued by the concept of vegan pancakes, though, stronglight: could you post the recipe or something? It strikes me that we have a bit of a black swan problem here, in that most people's definitions of pancake would preclude veganosity]

Anyway, here's a brief commentary on my ( Lessons Learned re packing )

More news on the other-people-doing-my-work front: there are actually two groups who've been working on this. One group is definitely doing something different - it's like the difference between the algebraic and non-algebraic definitions of n-category. This was the elegant, moral definition I was talking about earlier. The other definition looks suspiciously like something I tried and rejected because it didn't work in an important case: I'll have to look at this one more carefully.