Spring

Judging from the weather it's not really spring yet. It's cold and humid - far from last year where April was the nicest month in 2007, and I got to go to La Palma at the end of the month. What makes me recognise spring this time is the amount of work piling up. After the long dark winter months, where everybody's sort of sleeping, still remembering Christmas as the highlight of the season. Then the spring travelling begins, it never fails, spring is the time for meetings and conferences all over Europe. Finally coming home to sleep in my own bed for more than a week before heading off again, I realise that I haven't done any work for the last two months. Well, not any real work, at least. TA'ing a physics experiment and hence introducing observational astronomy to young promising(?) students sure takes more time than one would think, specially when the first draft manual was written last autumn and has been constantly re-written ever since, mainly by me and a fellow TA. As I'm starting to hate the previously mentioned manual, I realise that I have to take students for observing as well, which means waiting for good weather. Checking three different weather pages every day to make sure we won't go all the way only to do our bad-weather tasks. And trying to predict whether or not the clear sky foreseen for the night after will actually stay clear once we get there. After weeks of weather inspections, it finally clears up just when I am at my busiest at work. Of course.
So here I am, again away from home, teaching students the art of focussing and selecting targets, while my "real" work, what will actually go into my PhD, is piling up in my office, forcing me to work long days and even weekends, so that my collaborators won't kick me off the project and leave me hanging with nothing to base my PhD on except that I fulfilled my teaching requirements.

It's spring again..