Conservation of good

Call it cosmic balance, call it karma, or call it Sod's Law. Whatever the nomenclature, this last week has been characterised by two events, one Good and one Bad. Do you want the Good news first, or the Bad?

I'll start with the Bad. This was, of course, the arrival of Em. Ha ha, only joking, this was the Good. Or was it? (she's sat next to me as I write this and has just hit me...) Get this: I managed to arrive not only early but with flowers. How New Man am I, eh? I did feel a bit of a ponce standing there with flowers, and I could feel the disapproving stares of all the blokes around, as if I'd let the side down. On the other hand I could also feel the correspondingly approving glares of all the birds around, as they all thought "aaahh!". Anyway, she arrived and was suitably embarrassed by the bouquet, so mission accomplished. She's been here for a week now and I believe she has enjoyed it so far - particularly I think she found pleasure in filling my bachelor pad with girly, petally things that smell of perfume, humph. Anyway, she's busied herself reading latin books and doing historically minded things. Given the theme of this blog entry, she has given me a list of five things that have annoyed her so far and five things that she likes:

Bad:

1. The price you see is not the price you pay: they invariably add tax on at the till, and don't forget the 20% tip for food and drink.

2. Loud people who think it's OK to shout at each other across the pub, instead of (shock) moving the one's mouth closer to the other's ears by means of either one's legs.

3. Toilet cubicle doors here have an approximately 2cm gap around the edges (and stop a foot above the ground and a foot below the height of the average person)

4. Adverts on TV: Britons, think twice before you knock the BBC. An episode of the Simpsons (for example) will contain approximately four advert breaks. Also, don't think that horrendous unreality TV and crap quiz shows are a purely British phenomenon - they are ubiquitous here too.

5. The lack of moisture in the air - it really dries the skin and makes it itchy. This dryness is brought about by the low air temperatures: -15 deg C air doesn't contain much liquid water.

Good:

1. Jonny, of course. (Really! This is not doctored by me in any way.)

2. Sunshine (although I am aware that this is, technically, the same as the first entry given that the source of the Sun is, in fact, my backside)

3. Not having to commute for an hour twice every day - and swapping this for a ten minute walk that takes in one of the best views of Boston.

4. Getting back to the fusty history books. (again... really!)

5. Glasses of water automatically appear in front of you at restaurants without you having to ask approximately five times (she should have learnt by now: Bitter is Better).

So, on to the Bad. I've mentioned the HST campaign, the reason why I'm here. Well, we have been happily observing Saturn since the 13th of January, and all was looking good for a really great campaign. We were expecting a solar wind disturbance to hit Saturn over the last weekend and we had the Hubble Space Telescope trained to catch the resulting auroral storm in all its glory. I rushed in to work on Monday morning like a child on Christmas morning - only to be told of the news. On Saturday the Advanced Camera for Surveys (the one we use) went into safe mode. That's technical for "buggered up and turned itself off". I couldn't believe it - why, oh why, did this have to happen hours before all the fireworks were going to go off at Saturn? It pained me to think of bright auroras lighting up Saturn like a Christmas tree - and us unable to observe because of some poxy electronics. We're hopeful that the detector within the ACS that we use isn't actually one of the broken components and that the engineers at NASA might be able to restart it before we are scheduled to observe Jupiter (it's our campaign mentioned in the BBC article, although they've erred in describing the HST campaign as "support" for the New Horizons mission when the truth is, of course, the other way round). So at the moment we're left with half a data set and the knowledge that for every Good Thing that happens, there occurs an equal and opposite Bad Thing.