Laramie...

...so much more than the cigarettes smoked by Marge Simpson's sisters. I like it here; last visit I was in some wierd culture shock, but now I'm used to it it feels like home. I spend a lot of time inside, sat at the desk (I built it, yay flatpack!) trying to squeeze sensible words into my thesis, but it's when I leave that I'm happiest. The roads are wide and quiet, and running on them feels like freedom (slightly dangerous freedom- the pavements seem to have been constructed by someone who wanted the town to be an extensive skate park). The people are friendly, and the language is mostly understandable with a few minor exceptions. I still get confused, like when the tills at the supermarket put your change in a litlle cup instead of trusting a human to count it out, and when people ask how you are but don't expect an answer. But generally it's nice. We have the luxuary of a car (when it works- there is a large dent from Andy's 'deerstrike' incident, and the small catalogue of worying noises is ever varying), and there are lots of places we can get to reasonably quickly. By American standards anyway: we drove over 1000 miles in our Yellowstone trip, and most of the time we were still in Wyoming. As well as Yellowstone, we have been into Fort Collins and to Vedawoo, 'fat crack county' (stop sniggering at the back). I'm hoping that we can go skiing at some point too; it's a great place to enjoy the outdoors. Americans sure do open spaces well... But then my priority while I'm here has to be the thesis... talking of which, tenuous arguments for the provenance of magmatic underplate don't write themselves... back to it!