Ad fuck-off far-away Astra

I've been having some trouble with internettery lately. I blame living in Pretoria, which is why I'm not there right now. Point is, I could complain lots more, but instead here's my belated report on the USS Dauntless expedition to Sutherland. Any day now, I might even finally get around to letting you know how my Icon module and SFFSA mini-con talk went.

First, Sutherland is far to go by road. I believe that was the furthest South I've ever been down the N1. It was 6 of us in a 17-seat buslet, plus 2 charter drivers. They were disappointingly unlike the charter pilots of Cabin Pressure, but we didn't crash, which is nice. It's hard to accurately describe a drive like that without giving it its own essay, but bear in mind it took us 16 hours to get down there, then 15 hours to get back, with only 17 hours in Sutherland, and half of those Sutherland hours spent sleeping - and only about 4 hours actually touring the stuff we went there for. It was a lot of travel for such a short visit. On the other hand, Apollo 11 spent 6 days travelling for just 3 hours on the Moon, so by pure time efficiency, we beat NASA.

There were 2 reasons to go on this trip: the people and the sights. Both were worth it. Special credit has to go to acting MCPT Jay and his mom for organising the whole thing flawlessly. But all the Dauntless crew are fun, and it's just a pity more couldn't join us. On the plus side, we were joined by two Cape Town crew members, who were cool and accounted for two thirds of the Starfleet uniforms worn during this visit.

(They would have had only half the uniforms, as I took mine down too, but annoyingly forgot to pack a belt, without which those pants simply won't stay up. And without pants, the top half becomes silly. Still, I think my Dauntless cap and Skeptic's Guide tshirt made a perfectly adequate combo.)

It was great being there with people who appreciated everything about the place and who each had something to teach. We killed quite a lot of downtime with games too, which seems like a very Dauntless custom. Playing Star Fluxx in the back of the bus by torch light was the sort of fun you couldn't possibly plan. Commodore Swart's custom radio service was also pretty damn amusing, but we only got half the audio book of Physics of Star Trek, half of some stand-up, half of the Onion's audio world atlas, etc.

(Insert 'Unseen Force' joke here.)

Then there was the place. Sutherland is small. Without rising much up the surrounding slope, you can take the whole town in with one glimpse. It also felt pretty regimented yet run down at the same time. Sort of the opposite of the Shire. It felt very different to any place I'm familiar with. We didn't see much beyond the hotel (which, for any vegans wanting to travel down there, had fuck all for me to eat except baked beans on toast), and that doesn't bother me much.

What we came for was the South African Astronomical Observatory.

Up on the highest point around, there's a flat-topped hill. From below, the white bulk of SALT is obvious, and from some angles there are a couple smaller things visible next to it. But when you follow the winding road up to this little plateau, there's a whole forest of stout, white tubes and domes spread across it. It's all open and windy, with an amazing long view way off to distant smaller hills.

We got 2 tours that day, a daytime tour of the big telescopes, focusing on the technical and historical side of their construction and use, and then a night-time star gaze. The day tour was cool, as wandered among the big white lumps. We were taken inside the oldest telescope there, built in 1938 but still in great nick, and then in to the innards of SALT, largest optical telescope in the Southern Hemisphere. I knew its main mirror was big, but I was actually staggered when I first laid eyes on it.

However big your screen is, it's not big enough to really capture the bigness of that mirror.

The night and day tours were too different to call one better than the other, but the night tour was certainly amazing. We were kept off the top plateau, since real astronomers were working up there (it was a Saturday night, but when you have to book your slot 18 months in advance, you're probably not too picky, and it's not like there's much else to do in Sutherland). Instead, down at the adjacent visitors' center, we had a guide aiming a pair of smaller but still massive telescopes at the sky for us, on a tour that started with our neighbouring planets (first time I'd seen Saturn's rings directly, plus at least one of its moons) and moving outwards to neighbouring stars, globular clusters, nebulae and even a neighbouring galaxy, which looked way clearer and closer than I would have expected. And the whole time, there was the lovely sprawl of the Milky Way to simply stare into.

Having read for so long about all this stuff, both on the ground and in the sky, it was great to finally put my own eyeballs on them. It was all pretty rushed, but not so much that I felt cheated. It was like having just the right amount of desert, even though you can see a whole table left to gorge on.

The little visitor center there was also interesting, but we didn't have enough time to absorb it all fully. I think it would be great for (and was presumably designed for) school tours, with a wide variety of basic science displays (including assorted fossils) and a fair bit of interactive crap.

Over all, it was a great trip, with a great crowd. I was a bit subdued due to travel fatigue and lingering work stress, so I might not have seemed that excited, but it really was great.

The following week was a bit rough, and not for the reasons I expected. I expected to be tired, lacking sleep, and maybe a bit resentful of the loss of all my usual weekend activities, but none of that came up, noticeably. Instead, my car's tyre got a big blob of tar melted to it while parked at the airport over the weekend (causing the noises I described in my previous post). This weakened the tyre enough that a week later it burst, happily only while I was going really slowly; I do a lot of fast highway driving these days, so the odds of it popping at a really dangerous time were pretty high. I was also woken at 03:00 on the Monday/Tuesday night after this trip by someone trying to break into my room. No harm done, but it wrecked my nerves for a few days and probably threw my sleep pattern off worse than the whole crazy weekend stuck in a bus.

N.B.

Just got home from a major weekend away; very tiring, very rewarding. Saw the SA Astronomical Observatory at Sutherland and got to peek through some pretty big telescopes at some pretty amazing sights.

I'll do a full write-up soon, but first I thought I'd better officially record that I heard some pretty alarming bits-falling-off noises coming from my car as I left Joburg for Pretoria. I can't see anything obviously wrong and it drove well enough the rest of the way. But if I'm mysteriously engulfed in a ball of flame on the way to work tomorrow, then that might be why.

Tomorrow morning is going to be painful in so many ways.

Back to the blackboard, please

I have officially decided, I need to get back into teaching. And not just after school tutoring, but back in the deep end. Proper, committed teaching. If anyone has any leads about teaching jobs in Joburg, let me know.

I've spent 6 and a half years expecting that I'd eventually get a development job, and feeling like that would be my true calling. Now I've got such a job, and it's a wank. The people who can afford my skills are the ones who least need them, the ones who I feel least deserve them. You can't, it seems, make a living from saving the world.

Except in teaching. I originally got into that as a supplement to my development experience, but the more I've looked at it, the more I see good education as the core of good social development. I'm never going to get rich teaching, but I wasn't aiming for that, and it's not like my current fancy-pants economist job is paying well.

Amazingly, a better place for me than my current office

And I know teaching; I've got nearly 5 years in my pocket so far, and I know both the government and IEB physical science syllabuses backwards, plus a smattering of stuff unique to the International Cambridge syllabus. Not least of all, I like teaching. It's chaotic and dynamic and challenging. It's hard, but a good hard, a worthwhile hard. By contrast, I've just spent 3 days making a single small value chain graphic look pretty enough by the boss's finicky standards.

It may be hard getting a foot in the door, since I don't have a BEd or PGCE (yet), but I'm hoping to get into a school in 2014. I'd like to make the change even sooner, but I doubt many schools will be hiring new people for the last couple months of the year.

So, if anyone has any leads about teaching jobs in Joburg, let me know. I'm most experienced at Physical Science (all grades), but I reckon I can pick up the English syllabus quick enough too, and I have enough background that I could probably handle History too, if pressed.

Relief, please

The good news is that I'm surviving. The bad news is that I'm still in Pretoria. I really, really don't like Pretoria, and I like it less every day. The only thing I can say I like about it is that cars in town actually stop and wait for pedestrians to cross the road, which my years as a Joburg pedestrian had taught me never to expect (since I started driving, I have always made an effort to give pedestrians the right of way myself, often shocking Joburg's pedestrians). Apart from that, I don't think much of Pretoria drivers. There basically aren't any of them within the city bowl, yet they still manage to crash into each other regularly and as soon  as they're over the rim, on the highways around the edge of town, they turn into vast numbers of speeding, aggressive arseholes.

And don't even get me started about the work I do. Worst research project I've ever been involved in, wasting 2 months of my life. Approximately half of that was literally completely wasted, with work thrown out and never used for anything ever again.

Weekends are now vital to me. I've been developing a big, convoluted analogy between emotions and electrical capacitors, but the short version is that some relief is essential. I'm buying a weekly six-pack, which is unusual for me, and cramming as much fun into my weekends as I can manage. I have to. But that also means I'm just plain wearing myself out. I need some days off to simply do nothing at all, all alone, and get my oomph back. This week, I get half a Sunday of that. I think 3 weeks ago, I took a full Sunday. Before that, my memory gets fuzzy. It's not really enough.

And this next weekend is going to be crazy-busy (in a great way) because the USS Dauntless is mounting a group expedition down to Sutherland, to see the pretty sky and telescopes. We're going by bus, which may be a little gruelling over that distance, but I've been wanting to go for years, since I first read up about the place in my first year of teaching (it was also partly covered in my first ever guest hosting of Consilience).

Otherwise, DeeTwenty [EDIT: I no longer associate with DeeTwenty and can not endorse it in any way] and its soon-to-be-public venue is looking to be the great center of my life's happiness (apart, obviously, from visiting Byron and  Moxie at my parents' place). It's a damn fantastic idea, and you should throw all your money at them. Now. Go. Throw digital cash. Then play games with me and/or people you like.

Good, Bad and Geeky Places

It's been suggested that I've been far too miserable the last month or so. I'm inclined to agree. It's been suggested that I should try to cheer up or do something to fix my situation. I'm inclined to agree with the latter, but because of that, I'm not happy to accept the former. I may reach a point where it does me more harm than good to be unhappy with my new status quo, and then I can look at ways to cope with it better, but in the mean time, unhappiness is good. It keeps me motivated to aim for something better, like Joburg. Apologies in advance to anyone who finds my grumpiness unpleasant, but you can't have your literal chocolate Sham until you've cleared all the metaphorical broccoli Sham off your simile-like plate.

But it's not all grim with me. Weekend visits to Joburg are a poor substitute for actually living there, and I keep running short on time for everything, even completely missing some events, but it's never bad to see friends. It adds even more motivation to get my life back on track, so that I can have more happy fun time with them. It's a carrot and stick thing, I guess.

And it's kind of fantastic to know that I have too much fun stuff waiting for me. How crap would it be if I was miserable and lonely and bored in Pretoria, and didn't have anything to look forward to in Joburg either. In terms of roleplaying groups alone, I need a 4-day weekend, so I can carry on with my own Star Trek and Warhammer campaigns, fit in the other complex stuff planned for my formerly-usual Thursday group, and also start off with a new D&D campaign run by Damon White (a name that will soon be revealed to be of broader relevance to this post) just like the ones he used to run in the old days.

Particularly exciting among the good times this past weekend was the meeting to learn about Owen Swart's new project, a dedicated geeking venue. Unlike geek shops, which kind of want you to buy stuff above all else and tend not to have very comfortable gaming areas, this venue is intended to be a place to gather a fair-sized mob and get some proper gaming done in homely comfort, but without actually hogging someone's home while they're trying to sleep. It's a damn fine idea, which immediately reminded me of Babylon White, the residence of the White family, friends of mine since early high school. Bab White always fulfilled a similar role, as the Whites were up at all hours, very hospitable and unusually well stocked with games of all descriptions. The big difference here is that you don't need to be a family friend of the Swarts to enjoy Owen's cunning new plan. (Also, nice coincidence with the names there.)

I will certainly report more as I learn it.