A post!

Where do I start? The last blog entry had me in England. Since then I've had a wonderful holiday in Wales (and I must remember to walk the Taff river walk next time that I'm Wales). This holiday included eating a squirrel (very tasty). I took the train from Cardiff to London (it's nice to be on a train that actually goes quite fast) and planned not only a walk or two in Wales, but I discovered an article about some great-looking walks in Devon! Okay, I need another trip to the UK.

I got to the airport rather early and started chatting to various other people joining the queue for the Qantas flight. I then discovered that Terminal 4 at Heathrow is not very exciting and so bought myself some noise-cancelling headphones (wonderful things) and listened to music until the flight departed. What a flight!! I woke when we were flying on the boarder between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The mountains were phenomenal ... not a cloud in the sky. We then crossed over the Himalayas, the ganges over India and then down into Bangkok. We missed the riots by about 8 hours (the next Qantas flight got stuck). I managed to sleep quite a bit on the next section of the flight (although the person in the seat next to me was asking a lot of questions about Australia - she'd just broken up with her boyfriend and decided to spend a year in Aus! - she thought that Brisbane was a short train ride South of Sydney).

I arrived at 6-ish in the morning. Took a taxi home, changed clothes and then went straight to work. Between then and now I've been doing things non-stop! Ms. M. Mao, a PhD student at the ATNF and UTas, was visiting and requested lodging in my guest room. Luckily I had bought back a large, red, fluffy Welsh dragon for her which seemed to go down rather well. In fact, it made its appearance at dinner (of course, at the Ranch) and was cuddled by numerous astronomers (attached photo is of David + dragon).

I'm now forgetting most of what happened last week (or was it the week before). We (a whole heap of us) went on a wonderful hike in the Mt Kuring-Gai Chase national park where we found some amazing aboriginal art (I'm not sure of the rules about putting photos of the artwork on the web so I'd better not), Ms. M. Mao and I went on another enjoyable walk in the local national park. Oh, I also flew to Melbourne and back. I like Melbourne ... it's full of trams. I gave my talk twice - once at the University of Melbourne (where everyone fell asleep) and once at Swinburne (where people seemed at least moderately interested). On Friday I played squash and won one game and lost about five. I've missed mentioning a great sextet rehearsal where we played the Prokofiev sextet for clarinet, piano and string quartet ("Overture on Jewish Themes"). It's wonderful.

What else? I forgot the most recent students+telescope run. We had a BBQ at Rob's house that was rather exciting and involved us extinguishing it with a fire extinguisher. I've written a couple of telescope proposals for the next semester. My summer vacation student started - he's really good. We found some weird circularly polarised pulses coming from a star (not a pulsar). I gave an interview to the ABC in Perth (via the telephone) about Earth-based time standards and whether pulsars were better than atomic clocks. I got locked in Jessica's garden whilst trying to take her dog for a walk and had to scale her fence. Finally, I was lucky enough to be invited to give a talk with Jocelyn Bell on pulsars at the Sydney Observatory. She gave a great basic overview on pulsars and I continued by discussing the research that we're currently carrying out.

Back to work .... (I'm going to have Christmas in the tropics!!)