In the Dark

Last week was the third week of the semester at Maynooth University and teaching activity has ramped up to its full level: tutorials have begun; assignments handed in, corrected and returned; projects allocated; and so on. With a quarter of the term now over, and two new modules to teach, I’m relieved that apart from a batch of assignments to correct (which I’ll do this afternoon), I haven’t fallen behind schedule.

The addition of our Space Week event made this an extra busy week, as did a few personal matters that have been dragging on for ages and weighing on my mind, but which are now at last resolved; the last stage completed on Friday.

To add to all this I had to interrupt work to make two extra trips from my office and back. On Wednesday I went early to my office on campus planning to write my Space Week talk in the afternoon, after a lunchtime tutorial. Unfortunately when I got there I realized I had left the power supply for my laptop at home. A sensible person would have bought two adapters, one for work and one for home, but I didn’t do that so had to go home to retrieve it. It’s only about a 20-minute walk home from my office but I was annoyed at having to waste 40 minutes there and back, not to mention a bit tired.

In the pub after the evening event, one of our technicians told me that he keeps a collection of spare power supplies in his office, so I needn’t have bothered. Sigh.

The following morning I was in the office again when I got a phone call from one of my neighbours who told me the burglar alarm in my house was ringing. I could hear it over the phone actually. It’s very loud. I had time to get there and back before my lecture so I set off home once again. By the time I got back to the house, the alarm had switched off but when I checked the control panel it explained “REAR WINDOW. GROSS EVENT.” I did wonder what “GROSS” meant in this context, however. Had something particular disgusting happened? Or had 144 people tried to break in?

There was no sign of any break-in and all windows including those at the rear were intact so all was well. I then checked the instructions for the alarm to see what “GROSS” was meant to indicate. It turns out to mean one large thump on the window, as opposed to “PULSE” which refers to a series of short impacts. There was no certainly no sign of anything gross. Although there was no supporting evidence, my best guess is that a bird flew into the window.

Anyway, I reset the alarm and waited for 15 minutes to see if it went off again in case there was a fault and when it didn’t I went back to work. It hasn’t happened again.

I had two teaching sessions today, on two different modules, both of which I’m teaching for the first time, and also had to prepare the first assignments for both sets of students, so I thought it might be a difficult challenge, metaphorically speaking, to keep my head above water. What I hadn’t expected, however, was that the rain would be bucketing down all day, making it almost literally difficult to keep above water. Now that I’ve done what I planned to do at work I have to make my way home through the deluge. At least I remembered to bring a brolly…