In case you didn’t know, on a United flight back to Charlottesville from DC, the little prop plane can easily be overweight if too many passengers have reserved seats. And, if they don’t get volunteers to take the next flight 5 hours later, they will start choosing the lowest fare paying passengers to hold back in case the plane is overweight. Also, the NRAO seems to be very good at getting the lowest fares. So, in case you were wondering, astronomers don’t waste our precious funding (your tax-dollars) on such things, and save it for the science instead! Anyway, luckily my advisor was up for driving, so we rented a car to make the final leg instead. I imagine I’ll use my free round-trip ticket for United on a work-related flight, although my first thought was “Vegas, baby!”
So I’m just relaxing and decompressing my full brain a little bit. I imagine that tomorrow I’ll try and unpack, catch up on email, do some errands, and at least make an attempt to get back to work. Once those priorities are done, I have lots to write about, including my conference, the AAS stuff, CVille Skeptics, and whatever else I can’t think of at the moment. For now… pretty pictures!
Pretty picture of the Flatirons with just a bit of snow left.
The cool Mexican restaurant we hit one day, with the insanely bright chairs!
Paul, Chaitali (taking the picture), and I got to meet His Astronomical Badness, aka Phil Plait! It was really cool of him to take time out of his busy schedule to hang out with us and trade UVa astronomy department stories, chat about science and pseudoscience, and have a delicious pasta dinner. Oh, and geek out about Doctor Who. Just a little. Phil does great things for astronomy outreach, a topic that has been very important to me for some time now, and was probably the main inspiration for me to actually check out this whole skeptical movement and to keep the little blog of mine going. And he was such a cool guy to talk with! So that was totally awesome.
Since it’s now past 2am, I’m off to my own bed, in my own apartment, which I did miss quite a bit in these last few weeks…
Phil Plait! Oh you lucky SOB.