Complete

All of my family is back home, safe and sound. We are complete once more!

Sweet sadness

There comes a point in every girl's life when she has to choose between what she knows and how she feels, between what is safe and comforting versus new and daring.

That moment has arrived for me and to my amazement, I fear I have succumbed far, far too easily. Those of you who know me well also know me to be dependable, slightly boring and utterly unspontaneous.

That has changed. I have, at long last, given in to following where my senses lead regardless of established tradition, leaving behind the undiscerning innocence of my youth. When we first met, I was inexperienced, easily impressed. Alas, after all these years, I have grown beyond you; you limit me and I chafe at the confines. Yes, I know you both are very similar but you don't make my heart aflutter like my newfound love. Your nutty charms, that which I once found so endearing, have made you a liability to me - I fear that in this case, size does matter; I'm truly sorry. After all the good times we've had, if you could only change...but we both know you won't.

Farewell, dear one. Take solace that you have trained me well, that my new love is worthy.

New blog?

I have been repeatedly asked by several of my support group members to blog about my experiences with my Condition. I am generally a very private person but I've Survived long enough that my tale is apparently worth telling.

The new blog is going to be completely separate from this one; in fact, this is the only reference here that I will ever make about itt. It's geared towards bringing hope to others with my Condition, to show them that yes, it's survivable and that they're not alone. As with this blog, all entries there will be at most a "PG" rating: it's only not a "G" because of the medical complexities involved.

My Condition has been touched on here every now and then. That is as far as it will go here. If you, dear friends, are interested in knowing what happened in the past two years, please drop me a note so I can gauge if it's worth opening that part of my life up. So far, I do not consider that quorum has been reached and the current state is a No-Go.

Language

This is my weekend with the kids and I've been looking forward to it. I see them everyday but due to work, their schedule and a whole host of excuses that seem very shallow now, I don't really get to play with them much lately.

I took them to the local Science Centre yesterday for a playdate with a friend. One of the first things we saw was a ferrofluid and the kids were totally fascinated by it. Of course, they had to ask a bajllion questions about it, all starting with "Why?" - I tried to answer as best as I could, that the cylindrical shaft that they can pump up and down contained a magnet, that the dark liquid had supertiny magentically-susceptable coated bits mixed in and that the spiky shape that showed up when the magnet was close to the liquid was the extrusion of the magnetic field exerted on the liquid balanced by its viscosity. We also encountered a fog dish (mist from dry ice pooling in a large shallow dish) and a vortex chamber (mist from dry ice pulled into a vortex by powerful fans). Again, loads of questions. Language became a serious issue right away in all cases.

Talking to kids takes a special language. I try my best not to commit the fatal mistake of talking down to them; after being with the kids since they were born, I *know* they understand far more than they can express right now. But it's hard to explain things to them because the common reference points simply aren't there in most cases. They're inquisitive and that is very precious - I hope to do far better next outing.

Eventually, everything boiled down to, "Yeah, it's nifty, innit?" - I'm hoping that they got something out of it. And I'll keep trying.

HP7

...will NOT be read by my kids until they are much much older. Good grief!

12th Level Corporate Drone

This and this pretty much describes one part of my life. Enough said.

p.s. If you've never read Order of the Stick or XKCD, you really should!

Risky future

I'm reading Roving Mars by Dr. Steve Squyres, the Principal Investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover missions. It's a great read and it gives a good behind-the-scenes account of the MER missions. It's also quite depressing because they come so close to failing so many times. Dr. Squyres started down this path nearly 2 decades ago. He's spent most of his professional life on this and he's one of the fortunate ones in that his planetary mission succeeded in its goals.

Reading his book made me reassess the path I'm on. I've got a good science degree with which I'm making decent money on but I'm also doing my M.Sc. in astronomy on a course-based program. It's very slow because I can't take more than two courses per year as that's all I can handle right now between work, family and education. At the end of it, I will have to try and find a university that will take me in for my doctorial studies. Only when I have my Ph.D in astronomy or astrophysics will I be able to work in that field. I will be in my mid- to late 40's by then. If I make any contributions, it won't be for another decade or two, probably the latter.

If I transition over to astronomy/astrophysics, I will be making far less money than I am right now. I've also got my eye health to consider; I've heard of blind software developers but I only know of exactly one blind astronomer. Astronomy has always been considered a visual field and that assumption will stick regardless of any advances in assistive technologies.

So why am I even down this path? Isn't it smarter to stick with computers, saving my earnings for the time when I'm blind? The honest truth is that I don't know if this is the right path. My heart says "Go for it - this is your dream!" but it doesn't pass any risk analysis of the situation.

For now, I'm going to stick with it. Dreams are great but they can't feed me if I go blind.

Much ado about optics

We are going to a very large star party soon. That means digging out and servicing telescopes that we mothballed since we moved from the US. You would think this is a simple task and it would be.

Except that I have an ungodly number of telescopes.

I've narrowed it down to two that I'm taking: my large Schmidt-Cassegrain and my rather unusual 4" Russian Maksutov-Newtonian. The large SCT is fine - I bought it fairly recently. The Mak-Newt however, gave me quite a bit of trouble since there were many pieces and they weren't all in the same box. Many *many* thanks to my poor long-suffering sis, who was kind enough to help me find the bits needed.

Now, I just need some clear skies so I can get reacquainted with my darlings. I haven't gone out since 2004 - my visual acuity has been deteriorating significantly in the past three years and I am at the point where I can no longer see fine details. This time, I'm resorting to CCD imaging to help me see what's up there. Realistically though, if I continue deteriorating as I am currently, the time will come when I will be blind. I hope that's far far *far* in the future but one can never tell. Meanwhile, I'm going to make and cherish as many happy memories under the night sky as I can. If nothing else, I hope to teach my kids all I know.

We got a Meade DSI CCD camera for me recently (thanks sis!) and it has yet to see first light. I hope to do that within the next two weeks or so. Otherwise, it'll see first light at the star party and that would not be a good thing since I hope to be familiar enough with the CCD to take nice pretty pictures.

Yay! Pretty pictures! :)

Friendships

Over the weekend, the family of a close friend left the province to move to the East Coast. We've grown distant over the past little while as we went on with our daily lives but I've known them for 16 years now. Between the two of them, they raised three amazing kids. If I could be half as good as they were with their parenting, I would be ecstatic. I wish them all the best as they pursue their dreams. But I will miss them nonetheless.

That got me thinking so I took stock of my relationships and realized just how many lives I've had the privilege to connect with over the course of the two decades or so since I arrived in North America. I try to call all of them at least once every six months or so. Our lives have intertwined at some time in the past and though we are not seeing one another daily any longer, when we chat it's like as if we haven't really been apart.

Friends are amazing. Seriously.

Pruning one's life

Well, I'm getting some responses back from folks I talked to at the conference recently. Looks like I'm going to be a pretty busy gal in a bit. There are four non-negotiable priorities: family, health, work and my studies. After that, I have my volunteer work (science outreach/education and computational support/analysis) and my D&D.

I have a nasty feeling that I'm going to run out of time mighty quick. I suspect that D&D's going to be the first to get dropped but I hope not - I really do enjoy not being myself once every two weeks. Helping out with processing astronomical data is my first step towards my new career so dropping that would pretty much mean delaying my dream of moving to an astronomy/astrophysics career. Science outreach/education is something I'm passionate about - anyone who's a parent or guardian these days will (hopefully) notice the precipitous drop in both quality and depth of science education. I don't expect to halt that but I do hope to bring the spark of knowledge to some child's life, even if it's just my kids.

Ah, choices!

p.s. Before I get IM'ed to death about it, yes, I *know* my avatar picture doesn't look much like me. I've already spent way too much time twiddling with it and I'm not doing anything more!

Full

I have just had an amazing 5 days at my astro conference - 3 days of papers, 2 days of outings. The last outing was Banff National Park and the Columbia Icefields to see analogies to Martian landscapes here on Earth. I will never look at the Rocky Mountains the same way ever again. I had a chance to hold pieces of Mars and Vesta in my hands. I got to learn in detail many things I didn't have good coverage on, blind spots in my knowledge. Best of all, I got to pick the brains of live experts in those fields.

I also got to meet some very interesting people. Some were nice and friendly, others were stand-offish or rude. All very bright people with a great variance in people skills. I re-learnt an important lesson over the weekend: being smart is great but being personable is better. Why? Simple: science needs to be communicated well and if you can't do that or if you put people off with your attitude, what you know will be deeply depreciated because no one will care what you do.

I also got a pretty good map of the political situation of the various organizations. I'm a little saddened that there's so much politics going on; I'm no stranger to it but I had hoped that we could set aside our pettiness and focus on the science. *sigh*

I admit that I was feeling a little nervous going to the conference. There's a lot of very intelligent people there, most of them leaders in their field. To give you an idea of the caliber of the people there, we're talking about the Galileos or Newtons in their fields of research. So yes, it was quite intimidating and I really wasn't sure if I was going in over my head. While I can't say I understood everything, I did absorb about 90% of what I heard. I guess all that extra swotting over the past few years hadn't been a waste of time after all.

I'm totally exhausted. I'm more tired now than when I started. When I close my eyes, I see light curves. I can't wait to go out with my telescopes and see familiar things in ways I have never seen them before. So distant, yet a tiny bit closer now that I understand them a bit more. I've learnt so much it'll take at least a month to fully grok what I've learnt, including extra reading to fill in the gaps.

I have a headache.

But I'm full. Oh so gloriously full.