New Haven is set in sensational countryside, as became clear last weekend when Caleb and I hiked Sleeping Giant State Park - a traprock mountain that juts out of the Connecticut farmland, eight miles from Yale. We took the B-trail. As it happened, this wasn't so much a walk in the woods in the commonly understood sense as, well, Alpine rock climbing. Yet worth every twisted ankle. From the pinnacle you could make out a few of the nearby villages. But the greatest thing by far was the lush forest folded out below. Here, many miles from a road, total silence. Coming from the UK, where the white-noise hum of traffic is just about ubiquitous, that really is quite special. It was a reminder of what first enchanted me about America: the vast open landscapes, expanses of territory to explore, such variety. Of this, then, I plan to do much much more.
As weeks go, this was a productive one. I completed and sent off a book review - my inaugural publication. Watch out for Contemporary South Asia 19/1 (2010)! Survived a stats midterm on probability, bizarrely finding a covariance proof kind of straightforward, while scratching my head to bits over something I'm fairly certain we covered in pre-school (knew I should've kept my notes). And at last I got round to reading Robert Putnam's mind-blowingly well-researched book on civic life in modern Italy ("Making Democracy Work", the product of *25 years* of field work) in time for a presentation Monday. So hardly a second to spare for mischief!
Odds and ends, bits and bobs, this and that, to tie up over the weekend. And the domestic chores I'm congenitally abysmal at.
Next week: much less frenetic.
*Exhale*.
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