Oooh, a busy few weeks…

… both just gone and ahead of me.

Just back from a quite frankly crazy two weeks of travel – I spent a few days in Padova, Italy for a couple of Herschel meetings – the first being for the SPIRE consortium, the other for the SAG1 team. Padova is an absolutely beautiful city, and the observatory there was home to Galileo when he first turned a telescope to the skies 400 years ago. Flying BA didn’t actually suck, for once – and I even flew back to Gatwick rather than Heathrow from Venice, which was a godsend. Pity I didn’t have time to explore both Padova and Venice – that’s the bane of being an astronomer – you get to go to nice places, but you’re working and never see anything, so you may as well be in Brixton for all intents.

I also managed to cram in a week of vacation time back in Ireland with the family (the kids turned 3 and 1) – unfortunately with kids, you’re on the go all the time, and thus feel utterly knackered when you get home as a result. (The 14 hours of travel via train and ferry didn’t help – flying with a 3 yr old and a 1 yr old simply isn’t on). So today, I’m going to enjoy the sun and the football with a very nice cold bottle of beer – and yes, I’m supporting Germany, but really only to annoy my very unpleasant neighbour on one side. The neighbour on the other is not only Scottish (and extremely nice), but also a former professional footballer for Charlton, so he’ll be joining me in my support for Deutschland ).

In astronomy news, I’m chuffed to have gotten observing time on Gemini South again – so preparing my Phase II submission for this, plus work for SPIRE, plus working on proposals for the Open Time call for Herschel observing programs will mean an extremely long and hard week ahead – not helped by the hot, sunny weather here in London or the lack of air conditioning in my office….

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