Matriculation et al.

I've had a busy day today.

David is installing turf in our back yard (it's really starting to look awesome) and it needs to be heavily watered for the first week or so or else it just turns yellow. Since our landlord graciously agreed to buy the turf, we figure we'd better not spend his money and be left with nothing to show for it. I was tasked last night with getting a hose so that we could execute the requisite watering. I achieved this goal, but was frustrated by the extremely crappy Hozelock brand adapter to attach the hose to our kitchen faucet (there's no external tap). Hozelock makes some nifty fittings, including a whole set of quick disconnect style adapters.

Unfortunately, their design team must be a bunch of boobs, because the adapter has asymmetric openings, allowing the faucet in one end, but not out the other. The expectation is that your faucet isn't of the particular shape and size which would require it to poke through the adapter, but of course my faucet is of exactly that shape and size. I modified my Hozelock 2274 MultiTap connector like so. The annoying thing is that it would've worked exactly as well if they had molded the plastic in this fashion to begin with.

After "fixing" the hose, I raced off to work to go to a group meeting (which was delayed from 10:30 until 10:45, further crunching my available time to get to Brasenose by 12:10 for Matriculation). I snuck out of the meeting at 11:35, biked home, quickly changed into subfusc (doing a fairly good job on my first ever bowtie knot, if I do say so) and ran out to catch the bus into town.

I met up with the Brasenose Dean of Degrees and the one other student, Verena, who arrived this term and thus needed to matriculate at this odd time of year. We proceeded to the Convocation House (frequently used in films as an 18th century parliament room) where we, along with about 20 or 30 other students and the Deans of Degrees from their colleges sat and waited. The Provost carried in the big gold mace, followed by the Chancellor who formally accepted us into the University (in Latin) and then gave a short speech about how this marked a rite of passage and so forth. I really wish I could've got pictures inside, 'cause the room is really cool and everybody (especially the Chancellor) wears fancy duds. I did get a couple of photos back at Brasenose, though, including this one, which nicely shows the Radcliffe Camera in the background.