26 Feb 2012 - Uploaded a bunch of AFF posts, and started uploading the Facebook ones for 2008 and earlier. It seems easier (for readers, and for me) to put everything in according to date, rather than site. Luckily once I get past the Facebook stage I won't have any more problems like that - Facebook is the only second blog I've kept; aside from the years (2006-2009) that I used Facebook notes as a blog, I've only ever used one blogging site at a time.
27 Feb 2012 - All Facebook entries from the beginning (2006) through till the end of 2008 are uploaded.
Half of 2009 is uploaded.
2 Mar 2012 - All 2009 entries are uploaded. You can now read the blog through till the end of 2009!
13 Mar 2012 - Uploaded a couple of 2010 entries. Not many, it's been a really tired, ill week.
14 Mar 2012 - And a few more. The AFF blog is now done until the end of June 2010.
Since I couldn't sleep, I uploaded the Jan-Jun Facebook posts too. All posts for the first half of 2010 are now here.
24 Mar 2012 - We're done with the AFF posts through till the end of September 2010. I wanted to do the Sep-Dec posts too, but I can't stay awake.
This is a big milestone too - fully one third of the AFF posts are now here!
13 Apr 2012 - The AFF posts for October 2010 are done. I can't do more than that right now, I've been pretty sick and I tire (more) easily.
Later - Couldn't sleep, so the Nov and Dec AFF posts are up too, aside from Virtual Christmas Gifts, and I couldn't decide whether to put those in or not. I'll think about it.
30 Apr 2012 - Facebook posts for Jul - Dec are now uploaded. The blog is complete up to the end of 2010.
3 May 2012 - Happy birthday to me! Uploaded a couple of posts, including one that kept getting denied on Facebook and AFF both, and ended up never getting published until now. I wanted to do more, but I'm supposed to be up in 5 hours to take Mom to a pre-op in London.
Good news, though - the Facebook posts are all done, so uploading should be more streamlined from now on. At least until I get everything up to date and then start tackling the paper diaries, dating back to 1997. (I did have typed copies of them, on Bolt and Yahoo Geocities, but unfortunately both those companies shut down their sites without letting me know. Bastards.)
9 May 2012 - Still uploading, but slowly. I'm tired. I keep drifting off into my own little world. And there are a couple posts that I don't feel like I can upload because of privacy issues with friends and family. But January is done, and that's the best I can do for now.
Congratulate me, though, because we've reached the 200th post mark.
10 May 2012 - Still uploading. Wow, I really wrote a lot in February.
14 May 2012 - The AFF blog has temporarily disappeared - at least I hope to God it's temporary - so I uploaded the posts from my other Blogger page instead. It kind of throws off my schedule, but there's not much I can do about that. I can't believe how much easier it was to import - no copy-pasting or anything. It's a shame AFF won't allow it, but they like to pretend that no other web sites exist. *rolls eyes* One reason why I don't go there much anymore.
15 May 2012 - Been a busy girl tonight. Couldn't sleep (again). Posts are uploaded until the end of March 2011. I'm also starting to use this as my current blog (since all of Moonbeams has been uploaded) so you'll no longer be able to look at the top post to see what's been brought in in the last few days - recently written posts will be at the top (in chronological order) and recently uploaded (but not recently written) ones will be under that. Or you can just look at THIS post to see if I've uploaded anything new. I'm pretty good about updating you here.
18 May 2012 - Uploaded April 2011's posts. I only have one page of posts left now, meaning we're 2/3 of the way through AFF.
26 May 2012 - Uploaded May 2011's posts. That's all, I've been running around all week, and had 12-hour and 18-hour - and on one occasion, a 36-hour - days.
28 May 2012 - A couple of June's posts are done, but there are so many other things I could be doing on a beautiful cool evening. :)
Monday 28 May 2012
Sunday 20 May 2012
For The Moon Never Beams Without Bringing Me Dreams
In honor of this eclipse tomorrow that I would not have known about if not for Facebook - I shall tell you a story about my first job.
No, that's not a complete non sequitur. Keep reading.
When people ask me what my first job was, I know they're expecting to hear about babysitting, or dog walking, or waitressing. Truth is, I didn't actually do any of those things until I was 17 or 18, except for dog walking, and I didn't get paid for that. The story that I always tell people is about how Mom let me set up a little lemonade stand outside our front garden - which was more profitable than it sounds, because a) I live in England and virtually nobody knows what real lemonade is (our idea of lemonade is lemon soda made by Schweppes) so they were willing to pay a pretty penny for it; and b) I then moved onto selling home-made cookies, fudge, cake, flapjacks, pavlova, truffles, marzipan and anything else I could translate out of my Spanish kids' cookbooks (SO much better than English ones) as well as apples and plums and rhubarb and various vegetables from the garden. I won't say I made a packet, but I made what seemed like a packet to a kid. At least as long as Mom stayed inside. When she came out she always started giving people everything for free. *rolls eyes*
Even at six and seven I had a better head for business than my soft-hearted mom. I blame / thank Daddy for teaching me Monopoly as soon as I was able to talk.
Anyway, I digress. I tell the lemonade-stand story, because - well, it is technically correct. My first job working for someone else, however, was much less profitable and much more odd. At the age of fifteen, through a series of seemingly-incomprehensible events, I found myself working at the local university - University of Hertfordshire - under the grand title of Research Assistant. Although I didn't actually assist in research much at all - mostly I carried things, and copied down data, and helped develop a computer program for collating findings from labs around the world. I'm fairly sure the important title was just to make a geeky teenage girl feel important. Whatever. I ran with it.
What department did I supposedly assist in research for? Astronomy and Astrophysics, of course.
My love affair with the skies started when I was four or five. We lived in Spain when I was a kid, and somewhere between my fourth and fifth birthdays - at least that's when I think it was - we moved in with John, a boyfriend of my mom's. John worked in the yachting business, I believe designing yachts, but he was also a retired sailor who'd sailed around the world, and he taught me a whole wealth of things, including how to navigate by the constellations. Perhaps your average four or five-year-old couldn't memorise star charts for the Northern Hemisphere, or keep track of the phases of the moon and the tides, but you have to remember that I was born with an off-the-charts IQ and a thirst for knowledge. By the time I started school I could easily recognise Orion or Cepheus or Cassiopeia or Hercules or any of fifteen or twenty others. Moving back to England was hard for so many reasons, but the skies were one of the things I really missed. Even in a town the size of St Albans, where at least you can still SEE the stars (unlike parts of London), the light pollution makes it a vastly different experience from viewing them from a small island in the Mediterranean where the biggest town was a couple thousand people, and the air was dry.
I guess I kind of forgot how much I loved everything night-sky-related, until I met Julian when I was 12 or 13. Julian was a creature of the night, and he rekindled my love for it. In summers we would drive out to the country and stare through binoculars for hours. He built me a telescope for looking at the moon. He bought me books. One day he brought a huge package of those tiny glow-in-the-dark stars and we spent an entire weekend sketching out a map (an inaccurate one! LOL) on my bedroom ceiling, some of which still remains to this day. My parents didn't know about Julian, but they approved of me showing an interest in something that wasn't medicine, so they bought me more books. And I read, and started educating myself on the technical side of things, and learned, and loved.
And then Sir Patrick Moore came to town to give a lecture at the Alban Arena, and I knew I had to go. So Mom got us tickets. I must have been fourteen, maybe fifteen. And he's signing programmes in the hall afterwards, and Mom goes and chats to him, and is her natural charming, slightly flirty self - charming people comes as naturally to my mother as breathing, always has done - and hands him a letter, which is about me, and how much I love astronomy, and want to work in the field when I'm older. Plus all those other things like how smart and amazing I am - the stuff most moms like to tell anyone who'll listen. *grins*
And a couple of weeks later, I pick up the phone at home, and this very dry, very proper voice says to me, "Am I speaking with Miss Sandy Frost? This is Patrick Moore."
Oh. My. Gosh.
The long and short of it was that he found me a work placement. He talked to an old friend of his at the University of Herts, who I believe was the head of the Astro Dept - Professor Kitchen? - and they offered me a placement. Just because I wanted one, and they thought I was smart.
It never fails to amaze me how nice people can be.
So I went to work. Year 10s in this country have to do a two-week work study placement anyway, and usually the school arranges places with shops and nursery schools and offices that the students have to bid on, but they were happy that I'd arranged my own. (Or that fate and a gentleman's kindness had done it for me.) I went to work at the uni for two weeks to start. Professor Kitchen placed me with Dr Collett, and Dr Collett passed me onto Dr Tanvir, and Dr Tanvir liked me and decided to keep me. I can't even remember the amount of projects I worked on that summer. They taught me how to write computer code, and set me to work developing a program that linked to all the observatories around the world. They had me assisting post-grad students with their projects. The one I remember the best was with an astrogeologist who was investigating the volcanoes on Io (one of the Galilean moons of Jupiter; the fiery one) in the hopes of discovering whether Io or Europa (icy crust with probable ocean beneath) could be potential harbors for extraterrestrial bacteria. They taught me physics, and how to use a mass spectrometer to read age and distance, and they took me to the building site of the new university observatory. They encouraged me to study different specialties, and I knew within a couple of weeks that I wanted to study the formation of nebulae.
We had a total solar eclipse that summer, the first visible in the UK since the 1920s, and I got to watch it with some of the best scientific minds in the field.
It was the most glorious summer. I felt like I'd found a niche for myself, like I'd discovered that missing piece of my life. I even managed to wrangle myself an invitation to go to the Teide National Park in Tenerife - a place I'd been a couple years before, and fallen in love with - which is considered the closest thing on Earth to the surface of Mars, and is where all kinds of experiments are run. (Don't ask me what kind. I never got there.)
I wished that I could have stayed on staff there forever, because I was SO ready to be done with high school. But I had another year to go. And then Julian died. And I shoved myself into earthly things and never went back to studying the universe. Julian WAS the nighttime; he was the moon and the stars and all the secrets to life, and without him I didn't want to care about any of it. After a while I just kind of forgot. It was easier.
Will I ever go back? Will I ever study again, go to uni, perhaps do a degree? Probably not. Even if I wanted to, I'm not sure that I CAN. Since the brain damage, I don't learn easily - not only am I no longer a child genius, I'm not even sure that I'm smart enough to grasp the basic physics that I would need to know. And most of the time I can live with that. But just occasionally, just once in a blue moon - or perhaps less often - I feel them calling my name, calling, calling, calling me home, and underneath that siren song is the promise of knowledge, of all the secrets of the universe being open to me.
[True story or smoke and mirrors? You'll never know. :)
In any case, I hope you enjoyed my tale. Now go enjoy your eclipse, and spare a thought for this girl who wishes she was there with you.]
No, that's not a complete non sequitur. Keep reading.
When people ask me what my first job was, I know they're expecting to hear about babysitting, or dog walking, or waitressing. Truth is, I didn't actually do any of those things until I was 17 or 18, except for dog walking, and I didn't get paid for that. The story that I always tell people is about how Mom let me set up a little lemonade stand outside our front garden - which was more profitable than it sounds, because a) I live in England and virtually nobody knows what real lemonade is (our idea of lemonade is lemon soda made by Schweppes) so they were willing to pay a pretty penny for it; and b) I then moved onto selling home-made cookies, fudge, cake, flapjacks, pavlova, truffles, marzipan and anything else I could translate out of my Spanish kids' cookbooks (SO much better than English ones) as well as apples and plums and rhubarb and various vegetables from the garden. I won't say I made a packet, but I made what seemed like a packet to a kid. At least as long as Mom stayed inside. When she came out she always started giving people everything for free. *rolls eyes*
Even at six and seven I had a better head for business than my soft-hearted mom. I blame / thank Daddy for teaching me Monopoly as soon as I was able to talk.
Anyway, I digress. I tell the lemonade-stand story, because - well, it is technically correct. My first job working for someone else, however, was much less profitable and much more odd. At the age of fifteen, through a series of seemingly-incomprehensible events, I found myself working at the local university - University of Hertfordshire - under the grand title of Research Assistant. Although I didn't actually assist in research much at all - mostly I carried things, and copied down data, and helped develop a computer program for collating findings from labs around the world. I'm fairly sure the important title was just to make a geeky teenage girl feel important. Whatever. I ran with it.
What department did I supposedly assist in research for? Astronomy and Astrophysics, of course.
My love affair with the skies started when I was four or five. We lived in Spain when I was a kid, and somewhere between my fourth and fifth birthdays - at least that's when I think it was - we moved in with John, a boyfriend of my mom's. John worked in the yachting business, I believe designing yachts, but he was also a retired sailor who'd sailed around the world, and he taught me a whole wealth of things, including how to navigate by the constellations. Perhaps your average four or five-year-old couldn't memorise star charts for the Northern Hemisphere, or keep track of the phases of the moon and the tides, but you have to remember that I was born with an off-the-charts IQ and a thirst for knowledge. By the time I started school I could easily recognise Orion or Cepheus or Cassiopeia or Hercules or any of fifteen or twenty others. Moving back to England was hard for so many reasons, but the skies were one of the things I really missed. Even in a town the size of St Albans, where at least you can still SEE the stars (unlike parts of London), the light pollution makes it a vastly different experience from viewing them from a small island in the Mediterranean where the biggest town was a couple thousand people, and the air was dry.
I guess I kind of forgot how much I loved everything night-sky-related, until I met Julian when I was 12 or 13. Julian was a creature of the night, and he rekindled my love for it. In summers we would drive out to the country and stare through binoculars for hours. He built me a telescope for looking at the moon. He bought me books. One day he brought a huge package of those tiny glow-in-the-dark stars and we spent an entire weekend sketching out a map (an inaccurate one! LOL) on my bedroom ceiling, some of which still remains to this day. My parents didn't know about Julian, but they approved of me showing an interest in something that wasn't medicine, so they bought me more books. And I read, and started educating myself on the technical side of things, and learned, and loved.
And then Sir Patrick Moore came to town to give a lecture at the Alban Arena, and I knew I had to go. So Mom got us tickets. I must have been fourteen, maybe fifteen. And he's signing programmes in the hall afterwards, and Mom goes and chats to him, and is her natural charming, slightly flirty self - charming people comes as naturally to my mother as breathing, always has done - and hands him a letter, which is about me, and how much I love astronomy, and want to work in the field when I'm older. Plus all those other things like how smart and amazing I am - the stuff most moms like to tell anyone who'll listen. *grins*
And a couple of weeks later, I pick up the phone at home, and this very dry, very proper voice says to me, "Am I speaking with Miss Sandy Frost? This is Patrick Moore."
Oh. My. Gosh.
The long and short of it was that he found me a work placement. He talked to an old friend of his at the University of Herts, who I believe was the head of the Astro Dept - Professor Kitchen? - and they offered me a placement. Just because I wanted one, and they thought I was smart.
It never fails to amaze me how nice people can be.
So I went to work. Year 10s in this country have to do a two-week work study placement anyway, and usually the school arranges places with shops and nursery schools and offices that the students have to bid on, but they were happy that I'd arranged my own. (Or that fate and a gentleman's kindness had done it for me.) I went to work at the uni for two weeks to start. Professor Kitchen placed me with Dr Collett, and Dr Collett passed me onto Dr Tanvir, and Dr Tanvir liked me and decided to keep me. I can't even remember the amount of projects I worked on that summer. They taught me how to write computer code, and set me to work developing a program that linked to all the observatories around the world. They had me assisting post-grad students with their projects. The one I remember the best was with an astrogeologist who was investigating the volcanoes on Io (one of the Galilean moons of Jupiter; the fiery one) in the hopes of discovering whether Io or Europa (icy crust with probable ocean beneath) could be potential harbors for extraterrestrial bacteria. They taught me physics, and how to use a mass spectrometer to read age and distance, and they took me to the building site of the new university observatory. They encouraged me to study different specialties, and I knew within a couple of weeks that I wanted to study the formation of nebulae.
We had a total solar eclipse that summer, the first visible in the UK since the 1920s, and I got to watch it with some of the best scientific minds in the field.
It was the most glorious summer. I felt like I'd found a niche for myself, like I'd discovered that missing piece of my life. I even managed to wrangle myself an invitation to go to the Teide National Park in Tenerife - a place I'd been a couple years before, and fallen in love with - which is considered the closest thing on Earth to the surface of Mars, and is where all kinds of experiments are run. (Don't ask me what kind. I never got there.)
I wished that I could have stayed on staff there forever, because I was SO ready to be done with high school. But I had another year to go. And then Julian died. And I shoved myself into earthly things and never went back to studying the universe. Julian WAS the nighttime; he was the moon and the stars and all the secrets to life, and without him I didn't want to care about any of it. After a while I just kind of forgot. It was easier.
Will I ever go back? Will I ever study again, go to uni, perhaps do a degree? Probably not. Even if I wanted to, I'm not sure that I CAN. Since the brain damage, I don't learn easily - not only am I no longer a child genius, I'm not even sure that I'm smart enough to grasp the basic physics that I would need to know. And most of the time I can live with that. But just occasionally, just once in a blue moon - or perhaps less often - I feel them calling my name, calling, calling, calling me home, and underneath that siren song is the promise of knowledge, of all the secrets of the universe being open to me.
[True story or smoke and mirrors? You'll never know. :)
In any case, I hope you enjoyed my tale. Now go enjoy your eclipse, and spare a thought for this girl who wishes she was there with you.]
Friday 11 May 2012
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