It’s been a busy week: constant headaches, my annual mammogramme, two cruise ship excursions, three German exams, a massage from the physioterrorist, a short (3-hour) course on internet marketing and a morning tour guiding at the Roque. Oh, and being taken out for lunch for Mother’s Day. This particular corner of Spain celebrates it on the 3rd Sunday in May, and has done since before the rest of Spain chose…
I was quite worried about stargazing on Friday, because I was out of practice and the weather report was distinctly dodgy. Actually it all went well. I particularly enjoyed the little kids who were looking through a telescope for the first time. Witha bit of luck I set someone on their first steps to enjoying science. I was hoping to show people a crescent Venus (yes, it goes through phases…
Life has been happening too fast to blog about. It’s nearly all good things but I’ve struggled to keep up. For example, on Wednesday I abandoned a Nobel Prize winner in a broken down car. Yes really. The Canarian Astrophysics Institute hosted a big partical physics conference on the island, all about the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which is an instrument on the ISS. (It measures antimatter in cosmic rays, with…
This morning I’m working from the residencia at the observatory. Why? Because I’m tour guiding at 11:30, but the Santa Cruz road is closed for road works from 9 am – 1 pm (and again from 4 pm – 8 pm, although that won’t affect me.) I chose to leave home very early and work on my laptop rather than drive for an extra hour. As I drove through them…
Well this is a novelty. I don’t believe I’ve ever been on strike before. I wasn’t going to join the strike because I’m self employed. Then a friend pointed out that the people who most need to strike, who most need things to change, are the very women who find it impossible to strike. So I’m striking for them – rather self-consciously to be honest. In Spain, some striking women…
I bought myself a rainbow maker. It’s a like plastic box that fastens onto a window with a suction cap. There’s a tiny solar panel on top which generates enough power to twirl a couple of prisms, and that sends rainbows dancing all around the room. I’ve always been a big kid about rainbows, and I love it. Of course it only works while direct sunlight hits the prisms, so…