Featuring passports, planes, an application and a really exhausted author

I'm writing this from the strange desk-bed contraption on which I will be sleeping for the next two weeks. The desk-bed is in a student housing area of UCI, in fact if this blog came with the ambient sounds you would be able to hear the noises from a bunch of students playing basketball in the background.

During the last 36 hours I have written and submitted application for a job as a lecturer in London, driven to Canada and back, flown to Santa Ana, seen Niagara Falls (from both the American and Canadian sides), drank only three beers and slept only three hours. It would not be an understatement to say I was bloody knackered.

The Canada trip came somewhat out of the blue. There I was dripping wet from a thunderstorm, that had opened the heavens to drench me 100 yards from the safety of my friends apartment, when my phone rang. The phone call was from my friend who had been in Canada for the weekend, and whose house I had just walked drippingly in to and over the weekend had moved my stuff in to storage within. It turns out that he had managed to get in to Canada using his American driving license, but sadly he had not managed to get back in to the US using the same form of ID. His passport, instead of being with him in Canada, was upstairs on his desk. Being as I'm such a lovely person, I offered to drive his passport up to the border when his wife returned with the car. So I did.

Before I drove up to Canada, it's about a five hour drive from Columbus to Niagara Falls, I took the time to complete my application for the lectureship at UCL (it will be interesting to see what if anything comes of it). The drive up was memorable only for the fact that I managed to get sunburn on my left arm, as it seems I always do on long drives in America. Still my friend was very grateful for my efforts, and the falls are very impressive and it made me think of Wonderfalls and there is a nice coffee shop in Buffalo called Spot. Which is not bad for a 10-14 hour road trip.

Although the fact that when I got back to Columbus, after midnight, that I had to tidy up my job application and submit it, before sleeping for a few hours and getting up to catch my flight out here to California. Means that by now my brain is no longer functioning. It needs to be embrace unconciousness for a while.

For the record unlike my last day trip, and only previous visit, to Canada I did not ride on a golf cart with an Indian (sorry Native American), sprinkle tobacco and dirt on a burial mound, see a porcupine, drive for over and hour on a dirt track or nearly die because both myself and the driver of the car were falling asleep on said dirt track. And unlike International Falls they do actaully have something worth seeing in Niagara Falls.

Um sleep now.