Wednesday, May 25, 2005

A Day in the Life

0730: Wake up and realise that I have overslept. Take a quick shower and run out the door to catch the bus.

0800: Catch the bus and doze off for fifteen minutes.

0820: Get to my office and realise that I forgot the keys at home. The next ten minutes is spent trying to find someone who has a master key.

0830: I finally get into my office. I spend the next half hour looking at the data from last night's big, bright, exciting gamma-ray burst.

0900: The dreaded Mission Operations Control daily teleconference. I waste an hour on the phone when I would much rather be looking at data, or even getting a root canal done.

1015: The weekly Swift/UVOT (UltraViolet/Optical Telescope) science teleconference takes place. Everyone is all atwitter about the big, bright, exciting gamma-ray burst that happened last night (and kept me up until one in the morning). We decide to write a paper on it and I get assigned the task of analysing the way that the optical and ultraviolet light faded.

1130: I spend the next hour and a half analysing the data and having a grand old time. This is the best part of my job.

1300: Buy a sandwich at the canteen and take it back to my desk. No lunch hour for the dedicated.

1315: Spend the next three hours or so working on the gamma-ray burst data. It looks good!

1600: Yet another teleconference. We prattle on to each other for about an hour and accomplish essentially nothing. I spend far to much of my time talking to people.

1700: Work on the gamma-ray burst data some more.

1740: Get a ride home with the person a couple of offices down.

1750: Arrive home, change my shoes, and go to T`ai Chi class.

1800: Spend two hours doing T`ai Chi. All stress seeps out of me and into the ground, where I never need to worry about it again.

2000: Go shopping for something for supper. I buy an ham steak, a quart of milk, a loaf of bread, some breakfast cereal, and a small box of cookies. Junk food rules.

2030: Arrive home and make supper. I make a rosti (potato pancake) and fry up half of the ham steak. Serve it with a green salad and drink a couple of glasses of water. For dessert I pig out on cookies.

2100: Socialize with my roommate for an hour or so, and learn more than I ever imagined about artificial legs.

2200: Write today's blog entry.

2230: Go to bed and read a chapter or two of Neverwhere (a great book).

2300: Go to sleep.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Rosti!

Anonymous said...

That was a memorable day: I spent about 19 hours almost continuously doing UV photometry on that burst... Needless to say the world looked a little blurry afterwards. How sad.