The Sabbatical Starts Here…
Today is 1st September 2023, which means that it is the first day of my year-long sabbatical. No teaching and no admin until 31st August 2024! I moved the last of my personal things out of the office yesterday and put an auto-reply on my email. I did plan to take today off to celebrate but I had some things to do relating to the Open Journal of Astrophysics so I spent the morning doing them. If the rain holds off I might do a spot of gardening later on.
A sabbatical isn’t a holiday of course, and will have plenty to do over the next year, much of it clearing a backlog of things I should have done well before now but failed because of workload issues. I make no apology for taking the first day off, however.
Next week will be quite busy. I will be attending a meeting in Maynooth next week and giving a public talk, which gives me the chance to post a reminder that it’s not too late to register for either/both:
Another thing I did last night was to deactivate my own personal Twitter account as well as the one for the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Twitter is both unpleasant and useless these days and I can’t be doing with it anymore. I had been on it for 14 years and had accumulated over 7,000 followers. Those that want to carry on following me on social media will find me on BlueSky or Mastodon. The same goes for those who followed the Open Journal of Astrophysics on Twitter.
Anyway, in a fortnight or so I should be heading off to distant lands. I’m greatly looking forward to getting away and being able to concentrate on things to do with research for a change. I’m looking forward to the temporary change of location, not least because a warmer climate might help with my arthritis…
In the Dark 
September 1, 2023 at 2:58 pm
Congratulations on a well deserved break from (valuable) teaching and (useless) admin. Given that you piloted the department through covid you richly deserve this time.
September 1, 2023 at 6:09 pm
If you are teaching and doing admin on 31 August 2024, then its not a year-long sabbatical….. 31 August should be the last day.
September 1, 2023 at 6:43 pm
Well, 31st August 2024 is a Saturday so I don’t think I’ll be doing any admin then either.
September 3, 2023 at 9:11 pm
Summer having arrived now that autumn is here, I went to Worcester’s glorious ground today for day 1 of their crucial div2 county championship match vs Glamorgan, which is likely to decide which of the two goes up with Durham to div1. Glamorgan looked the better team and reduced Worcester to 110-6 before a captain’s innings by d’Oliveira spared local blushes.
September 3, 2023 at 9:13 pm
It’s quite remarkable that Glamorgan are in third place despite only winning one game; all the rest have been draws.
September 3, 2023 at 9:22 pm
There is much to be said for going to a day’s county cricket (1) at a non-test arena where a decent crowd looks like it is, and (2) where you support neither team and can just enjoy the cricket.
September 3, 2023 at 11:04 pm
Yes, I always found Hove to be a good place to watch county cricket. I used to go to Sophia Gardens to watch Glamorgan, but the stadium felt very empty.
September 5, 2023 at 12:15 pm
It’s been a see-saw game and Glamorgan require 260 to win. That won’t be easy as the previous two team innings in the match have been 145ao and 170ao, and Glamorgan clearly saw something in the pitch at the start of the match to put Worcester in on a sunny day. I’m not there today, though.
September 5, 2023 at 4:39 pm
Too much for Glamorgan: all out for 179.
September 6, 2023 at 12:02 pm
It’s interesting that there are many more draws in division 2 than division 1.
September 5, 2023 at 11:29 pm
It’s been so long since Glamorgan have been in Division 1, since 2005 in fact. Probably not coincidentally, it’s been the same length of time since they last had a player in and around the England team (Simon Jones). As since the pandemic I’ve made an effort to read some of my cricket book collection, this makes me particularly sad as I’ve been reading about the 1969 County Championship win in Tony Lewis’s and Peter Walker’s autobiographies, and the 1997 Championship win in Hugh Morris’s autobiography. It would be nice to be candidates to win it again but I fear those days are over (and we’d have to be good in 2 successive years, which has hardly ever happened in history).