Santa Barbara is burning

Hello from the burning lands of Santa Barbara

Wow it's been two months since our last newsletter, it seems I just got sucked into a PhD vortex and I haven't had a moment to get my head above water to speak. We finally feel like we are iving the American life now, I don't think much about driving on the wrong side of the road, I calculate change in quarters, dimes and pennies quickly, rhetoric American English doesn't sound strange to our ears and turkey bangers and Mexican flautas look at home in our fridge. Yet when we listen to Jonny Clegg sing Asimbonanga or speak to family or friends over Skype we just want to be back home.

Nula is settling into home schooling Samuel and Luke after the American schooling system and Samuel were like a gummy bear meeting agent smith in the matrix. Samuel was born with an inquisitive mind which makes teaching him pretty fun, he's reading basic Dr Seuss books without much effort now and he can add some double digit numbers.

I bought an electronic project kit for him for sleeping alone in his bed for 7 days, of course I was also the one wanting to relive some of my childhood. We built an electronic organ yesterday which uses a graphite pencil coloured rectangle as a variable resistor to generate different pitch sounds - pretty funky, we almost got the pitch right for "doh a dear" from "the sound of music". Samuel also goes to a Wednesday home schooling group where his made some good friends, he even played some soccer there last Wednesday. They have also made plenty of good friends around the family housing and it's good to see kids being kids outside, playing soccer, hopscotch, riding their skateboards and bikes. It reminds of how I grew up as a kid in my neighbourhood before the era of high walls and electric fences.

Luke is a tough guy and he's adjusted very well to American life - he's accent is changing fast, using words like "Awesome" and ending most sentences with "right". He has two girlfriends, Gillian and Lucy, from families in our neighbouring houses and has a another good friend, Lucian who enjoys trying to keep up with his flying feet when he does Irish dancing. Luke's Irish dancing skills totally amaze us - he watches Michael Flatley you tube videos and then copies the choreography with incredible precision - he's been teaching himself tap dancing for about 9 months now. He attends a playschool twice a week and is really enjoying it and makes friends very quickly.

We get on with most people who live around here, there's everyone from philosophers to surfers to part time gypsy jazz drummers. Mostly people studying in the humanities - areas like religion and philosophy. But it's hard to say yet whether we will make good friends with anyone here, many people here will be graduating in the next year or two anyway. I get on very well with colleagues in my lab, they're from all over the world - India, Lebanon and Croatia to name but a few. Nula has been spending time with and eccentric crazy mom from her home group called Mitz - she's a wonderful mix of of Japanese, African and American and it shows in her big Afro. Her old Mercedez car broke down here at our apartments a few days ago and she got really excited about trying to fix it up herself and climbed into the engine and found out that the problem was with the condenser. On Friday she took Nula and the boys on a paper lantern walk but then the mountain caught fire and they had to leave early (this was the start of the fires that burned down many homes near where Oprah Winfrey lives in Santa Barbara which you probably saw in the news).

Some of the regular things we do here in our leisure time are a 15 minutes walk down to Isla Vista beach or a 10 minute cycle to campus point and the campus lagoons. I got myself a surfboard about a month ago and today Nula and I were taking turns practising catching waves on some small friendly swell at Campus point while the other watched the boys on the beach. Sometimes I have to slap myself while I'm surfing a wave and looking up the beach to see the office window of my lab only a few 100 meters away.

It's good to know my carbon footprint has been mostly reduced to food and about $30 of electricty and gas per month, I cycle to campus everyday and we only use the car to transport food from the nearby supermarket. The simplicity of life here is a refreshing change, our only real costs are food and rent. Musically I felt really starved until I found a grand piano in one of the community halls near us, so almost everyday, on the way to campus in the morning, I pop in and grease my fingers on some Bach, Chopin and a little random improvisation, it helps with my sanity when the work load gets intense. When I've raised some money from my cello sale, I'm going to buy some Uilleann pipes – I've decided this is the next instrument that I have to learn (listen to this and you will see why http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSjmvU_8xLY)

The PhD is fairly intense - I'm taking 2 courses (computer networks and computer security) and teach a basic computer programming course. The courses all have regular assignments, exams and one has a large research project, you just can't rest until the 10 weeks of the lightening speed quarter are over, if you blink you'll get behind. I knew the first year of courses would be tough until I get to the pure research part - so I'm just biting down on it and hanging in there. The security course has turned out to have it's fun moments - its taught by a wild Italian surfer who is one of the countries top security experts - he audited all the voting systems before the election and found that many of them are "hackable". Our final assignment is a hacking contest were we try and break into other peoples computers and they try and break into ours - it's controlled anarchy.

Talking of the election, wow - we are living through the 2nd great depression and the first African American president who has a grandmother who lives as a rural farmer in Kenya (this video just blows me away: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UreJZMY_2IY). There is a lot of hope now that Obama is taking the reigns - there were huge celebrations here the night he won, people were running around clanging pots and pans and generally going hysterical. The economic depression is very real here - I've started to notice retail businesses having closing down sales.

Well those are some random reflections from the past 2 months – I'll send you a link to some pictures and videos from the past few weeks soon.

Take care in yonder lands of Afrique du Sud
David, Nula, Sammy and Lukie