Starting work, good weather, house hunting, etc

I officially started in the Lucas lab two weeks ago, on April 13th.  It's exciting to be surrounded by bright people with expertise very different from my own studying the molecules, cells, tissues and organs that allow us to see: opsins, photoreceptor cells, neurons, the retina... all of this new to me.  For a little while, at least, I'm the new guy, and I get a pass to ask really stupid questions and make people explain all the acronyms they throw around.  Sure, I could google most of those things on my own time, but it's much more fun to hear another human explain it in their own words.
Importantly, the people in the lab are all fun, and the group has great camaraderie.

Over the past two weeks, Laurel and I have been looking for a bigger, quieter, greener place to live.  Currently we're living in a smallish apartment across from a mall in the center of town.  Our neighborhood, the Northern Quarter, is really fun: lots of cute/hip bars, restaurants, cafes, tea shops, etc.  Mostly charming older buildings.  There is a small grocery store on the corner of our block, so if we run out of a particular ingredient in the middle of cooking a meal, you can get it and be back in ~3 minutes.  There's something thrilling about that proximity and convenience, especially to us who grew up in places where we would drive everywhere.  So it's very fun in many ways to live where we do now, but it is also very noisy (trams and buses directly below our window, as well as the hoots and hollers of drunken revellers) and there is disappointingly little greenery in most of central Manchester.  The view from our apartment is a parking structure.
We've been looking to the green southern edges of Manchester, in particular the neighborhoods of Chorlton and Didsbury.  Manchester is no San Francisco, but good places here get snapped up very quickly, almost always on the first day they come on the market.  After many unproductive viewings, I'm happy to report that we have officially applied for a very nice semi-detached* house in the Trafford neighborhood, a 15 min walk or 7 min bike ride north of Chorlton.  Just wait 'til you see the yard!  The house is near a nice park, and on the day we viewed the house the cherry trees in the park happened to be in full bloom, against a clear blue sky.  The park certainly helped us make up our minds to apply for the house.

*"semi-detached" = duplex.  Why not "semi-attached"? "terrace house" = rowhome.

Waldo shirt!

Panorama!  Nice photos, Samsung Galaxy S6!