look to the stars....

The past seven days or so have been filled in mostly by settling into my new job, with my new title and at a new museum. It has been such a switch from history museums to a children's museum, but it is much more interesting than I ever imagined. And I am only on the first full week! The best part, I must say, is the fact I get to focus about half of my time on a topic I had only merely been fascinated with in my own spare time: astronomy.

When I was about 9, I became enamoured with a local museum we had a membership to for the simple fact it harboured a planetarium. Even though the staff would change the planetarium programme once a month, I still would beg to go each and every Saturday. It never got boring to me. Soon afterwards, I asked for ~and received~ an awesome telescope for Christmas. It was a real telescope, a version adults would have certainly used, not a kid. I would consult my star chart, do the calculations, then figure out where each constellation would lie in the nighttime sky while finding it through the eyepiece. I would spend many an evening around 8 or 9pm in the yard with the telescope.

Anyway, fast forward to the present and now half of my job is going to be spent writing up programmes and curriculums in conjunction with the STARLAB portable planetarium. Granted STARLAB is bulky, heavy and very hard to carry, in all of it's various boxes and bags, but once it is set up and you have the night sky lighting up the dome, it is breathtaking.

I think taking it to the schools for Outreach is going to be one of the many highlights of this job.

One interesting thing happened today in the museum which has never happened at any historical site I have ever been employed at. A little boy, approximately two years of age, found one of those googly wiggly eyes (used in craft projects) on the floor of the Art Studio. And guess what he did? He put it up his nose. He seemed ok and so did his mother, who happened to be sitting right next to him when he did it, but the gallery assistants still had to write up a report and the mother took the child to the doctor. Either the googly eye went straight up his nose and down his throat thus commencing to swallow it, or it is lodged somewhere in his erythroid sinus cavity and can easily be extracted by one of those sinus vaccumms the ENT doctors love so well. He was happy and smiling, I was told, when they left for the doctor's office.

Aside from the new job, I have had a really cool past couple of days. Greg and I were asked to be Maia's Godparents and the Christening is taking place 8th January. You may recall that I am her big brother's (Addison) Godmother. In lieu of talking to Casey, I had the pleasure of chatting to Anna not once, but TWICE this week. You must understand, museum people are really busy and work takes up quite alot of time, even your free time when you are technically home and "off work". So talking to Anna is always a treat for me, on the occasion I can actually see her, well, that is just splendid! Stephanie had called last week and we played catch up...married life, job and working on her graduate studies occupies so much of her schedule these days. And I finally got in contact with Elizabeth after not hearing from her for ages.

Other good news...my mother came through her endoscopic procedure and biopsy with flying colours yesterday, so we all breathed a sigh of relief.
Those cosmic forces must be aligned just perfectly in my corner of the world, at least. For times have been wonderful and happy for us all!