Getting prepped

My office today before the kickoff of USA-Slovenia.

St. John's Ball

Daniel managed to secure me a ticket to my first Cambridge may ball (all confusingly held in June), at St. John's college. It was a great time, with fireworks (above) and lots of other entertainments, bands, food and drink. I think Daniel has a photo of me in my tux, which I'll try to find and post.

Ole, ole, ole, ole!

What a win by Mexico tonight. I went to watch Les Bleus chez Plagnol tonight, so it wasn't a jubilant atmosphere. The first goal was beautiful, especially because you have to understand the offside rule to fully appreciate it. The timing by Hernandez to break the offside trap was perfect, and he didn't panic when faced with a one-on-one against the French keeper, Lloris. Now I'm super nervous about the USA-Slovenia game tomorrow, working out all possible group standings depending on results. Bottom line is the USA needs a W.

On Abbreviations and Gambling

I'm trying to maximize interest in the World Cup by placing bets on it in various ways, including:

1. Taking the USA to beat England on Saturday at an actual bookie (I stupidly placed this bet too early, and got 9/2 odds. All the goobers here betting on England have run them up to 13/2.)
2. A sweepstake at work where teams are randomly assigned to people. I got Switzerland and Greece, so there's a fiver down the tube.
3. A fantasy league (still negotiating the amount).
4. A group stage bracket prediction pool
5. Hopefully some random side bets on various games being watched chez Carl on his giant TV.

In all the correspondence on these topics I've been told to abbreviate it as the CdM (Coupe de Monde) because apparently WC doesn't show enough respect for the game.

A new hobby

The Sanger Cricket Club plays in an intramural Cambridge league with other teams from University departments and similar entities. The level of skill is highly variable from former top-tier University and county players to complete amateurs.

I quickly adopted cricket as my preferred local 'watching' sport when I moved to the UK, and last year I lurked on the cricket email list and watched one of the matches, but never actually held a bat or ball in anger. This year, however, I decided to enlist a bunch of friends as encouragement to actively participate, and have thus been attending practices for the last couple of months along with four other Human Genetics newbies (one of us is actually a ringer, but the others have either never played (me) or last played as kids).

I'm still pretty terrible, but I've been really enjoying competing in a sport for the first time since youth soccer, approximately 20 years ago. All five of the HumGen boys were selected for our second match last week, so a bunch of other people in our department turned out to watch, since the home pitch is on the Sanger grounds (founding director and Nobel laureate Sir John Sulston insisted that the institute should have a pitch on site). In order to give the spectators a show, but to the detriment of our team's chances, Carl and I (pictured above) opened the batting.

I was super nervous as I stood in to face the first bowler, but after a couple of prods which rolled straight to the fielder at short mid-wicket I managed to slap a shot forward of square leg to the boundary (which scores four runs). Because it's a limited over game and since Carl and I weren't exactly racking up runs after the first couple of overs, I started slashing at pretty much everything and edged it to the keeper during my second over.

We managed to set a pretty decent total (149) after our 20 overs, so we took the field and put the game in the hands of our string of decent bowlers including two (Tejas and James) from the HumGen crowd. I spent most of our fielding innings in the doldrums of deep square leg and deep point, but did make a couple of decent plays at long stop. Carl made the catch of the game playing in cover, and our boys generally took wickets at a good pace. The opponents had only racked up about 100 runs with three overs to go, so our captain handed me the ball to bowl an over. My first two balls were nervously wide, but I settled in and managed to get through it while only yielding a few runs (bear in mind I was facing the very tail end of their batting order).

Anyway, it was awesome, and last night should've been my second appearance, but was rained out. More updates soon!

Multitasking

Last week someone tweeted a link to this article about giving up multitasking. I have been thinking a lot lately about how to maintain focus (or 'flow') better at work, and how to lower my overall stress level, too. This piece is not only about both obviously distracting multitasking (reading emails while on the phone) but less obvious cases like thinking about work while talking to your kids. It didn't reveal much that I didn't already know, but the author nicely summarized his experience in giving up multitasking with six observations which all resonated with me (see the article for full exposition):

1. He was better able to enjoy the good things in life.
2. He made more progress on challenging projects.
3. He was less stressed.
4. He lost patience for activities which were a waste of his time.
5. He gained patience for worthwhile activities.
6. He lost no productivity by eliminating multitasking.

Reading it made me realize how much of the day I spend with random thoughts and distractions buzzing around in my head (again in addition to more obvious things like frequently checking email on my phone). There's a whole change of attitude possible here: take each moment and just do whatever you're doing in that moment. Today I stopped to listen to a thunderstorm, and was tempted to check mail while I was standing there, but I consciously resisted and kept with just one simple thing: listening. It may sound fruity, but it's a lot less stressful.

Patriot's Day

April 19th is the anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord, celebrated as "Patriot's Day" in Massachusetts by giving people a day off to watch the Boston marathon. While I haven't had the chance to do that recently, it nearly coincides with April 20th, the anniversary of my arrival in the UK.

This April 20th was my fifth anniversary in the UK, so I celebrated by barbecuing on my 5th floor deck and flying the stars and stripes.

Happy Patriot's Day, and happy anniversary to me.