purplecthulhu

I've been truly crap about actually saying what I've been doing the last few months. So here's a brief summary...



Went observing in Hawaii at the start of April.

Travelled via LA where I saw D & K, celebrated D's birthday, and got to see a book written by and signed by Dr. John Dee in the Huntingdon Library (along with lots of other stuff).

Got to Hawaii and was snowed on, rained on and fogged on. Out of 5 nights, I only got useful data for my project on 1 of them. Still, this was better than the previous guy, who got 4 hours of useful data during 7 nights.

Went home via Edmonton to see purplejavatroll and the rest of the Edmontonians. Had a great time! Lost my passport and had to stay nearly an extra week while a replacement was sorted out (hmmm - I get this rates me as a security hazard for the new ID cards and TIA...).

Got back to the UK in time to recover from the exertions of flying on the Sunday of the early May bank holiday weekend. Several people visiting that day, including major_clanger and bugshaw. Had a picnic in the park. Fell asleep a lot.

Back to work, with various bits of anguish and confusion between us and the french collaborators. Still seeing how that plays out.

Next weekend was archery with the SCA. Had a great time even though it was pissing with rain a lot of the time. Thwacked myself several times with bow string, got to try a long bow for the first time. Its all much more fun without sights on the bow! Had great feast, went home and slept lots.

Weekend after that I'm off to a conference on Dust and Supernovae in Paris. Meeting is over Friday and Saturday. Don't want to meet French collaborators who work in the same complex as they might think I'm shirking off instead of working on the next code release. Mostly succeed here, only am briefly surprised by one high up who doesn't know about the delays. I probably come over hassled and distracted to him. Talk goes really well. I think we have some really challenging and potentially controversial results, but even the SN pundits seem impressed and say that we're doing 'exactly the right thing'. Feels good! Meet various old colleagues from around the world. Have lots of good food and wine.

Back to London for Sunday afternoon. Meet up with major_clanger and bugshaw who are staying over in anticipation of dealings with The Evil Stepmother the next day. Hope they had a good time as I try to distract them from the inevitable tension.

More work in the week.

Which brings us to this weekend and the Late May Bank Holiday. I've been very lazy this weekend, with the only thing concrete that I've done being to totally reinstall Windows on my PC, which has been very poorly of late. Nuke piles of old games and software in the process, which is probably no bad thing, but do lose some old data files as well. Its not like I was using them, but it feels like a bit of my past being amputated nonetheless. So much for keeping backups!



And now we return you to today's episode!