On to real life

Ingrid on her way to work

Now that Elias is in school and almost all home repairs and bureaucratic paper shuffling is finished (we still have a few weeks before we are residents, and then some bank business), we can get back to a regular work schedule.  Ingrid and I are both working on finishing up some separate projects (I just finished long-overdue fixes of my ferp.ucsc.edu and greggilbertlab web sites - should be live today or tomorrow!), but are now more seriously tackling writing up our chapter for Annual Review of Phytopathology, due in December.  It is an exciting time that feels a little like being a grad student again -- we are expected to read deeply in the literature, synthesize it, and say something reasonably intelligent.  I hope we are up to the task!

On top of the Torre de Oro, with La Giralda
in the background, where Columbus
is supposedly buried.

Fortunately, we still have the flexibility to plan our own schedules, including a visit to the Torre de Oro, where the riches coming back from the West Indies in the 16th and 17th centuries all passed.  The 16th century drawings of rows of dozens of ships in the port just down the block where we live are remarkable. 

Yesterday morning we took a 2-h bike / in-line skate trip through eastern Sevilla to the Nervión district, where one of two stores in the city sell essential Chinese food products, like tofu, black-bean sauce, and wasabi peas.  Sevilla has really done bike/skating lanes right!