I’ve given up the teaching job. It didn’t take up all that much time, maybe 5 hours a week, but that cut my writing time from about 7 hours a week to about 2. Not good. Worse, I always had a corner of my mind on the look out for teaching ideas, instead of writing ideas. I wasn’t getting any writing done at all. Luckily my client had another, well-qualified…
Warp speed 9 yet again.
It’s been a mad week. Friday last week I had a coach party from a cruise ship. They were a nice group, and I wasn’t a particularly hard morning, but I felt enormously tired afterwards. In fact, I suspect I had some sort of lurgy, because I went on feeling enormously tired and very cold all weekend. Preparing English classes was enormously hard work. Worse, I had an appointment to…
Climbing around GTC
Most days, I rather enjoy tour guiding. And then there’s the days that I love! This morning was one of the great days. I got to show a photographer around the Herschel, Gran Telescopio Canarias and the MAGIC. Even better, I finally got to clamber around parts of GTC that I’ve wanted to get to ever since my first visit there three years ago. For example, I got onto the…
Another busy week.
It’s been a busy week. On Tuesday I went to see the friends in Franceses, go some exercise, and worked a bit on the Observatory book. Unfortunately when I got home, I found that I’d left my jacket behind (which was no big deal) with my phone in the pocket (which was rather more serious.) On Wednesday I signed on with the tax office as self-employed, met the friends in…
Inauguration of the Liverpool Annex
Today they inaugurated the annex building to the Liverpool telescope. The Liverpool is the joint largest robotic telescope in the world, with a 2 m mirror. Since there’s nobody at the telescope at night, it was built with very little in the way of workshops. But the new building contains a workshop to assemble and test new instruments, and a control room, to help humans commission them. Of course…