It’s been a quiet August from me, I know. For the latter part of the month, the reason is quite simple; I’m on holiday right now and its 35 degrees here! That temperature makes it quite hard to concentrate and sit and write. I have however managed to avoid serious burning and enjoyed some early morning runs before hiding during the hottest part of the day – so no need to feel too sorry for me!
From an aviation perspective, for most of July and August, until I went away at least, the North West UK seemed to have imported autumn and/or winter early – with incessant rain and wind a feature of most weekends – which is when I do almost all my flying.
It’s a shame as the year had been going very well to that point. I’d hardly missed a weekends flying since March until the second weekend of July and all my students have been making great progress. However, its not all doom and gloom as I know things are improving and hopefully we’ll have a great back end to the summer and will forget all about the difficult climatic conditions we’ve faced, until next year…
I haven’t been completely idle though as I’ve been working on a couple of pieces for magazine publication in the background. I’ve submitted one of them and am waiting to hear if its been accepted by a well known physics publication. The second piece is a book review I’m just completing and am hoping to have published in a popular mathematical periodical. I started with 1800 words and was quite pleased to get it down to 1200 – then I read the review guidelines… Lesson learned, I’ll read those first next time – 550 to 700 words is the standard for book reviews. Its taken me several drafts and redrafts to get it down to that and still get my message across. I might publish the longer review on here anyway at some point.
On the aviation front there will be more from me in Microlight Flying magazine over the next few months too – including an interview and a safety related article.
Aside from this I still have my day job to consider and I’m also gearing up for this years Open University study as I continue my physics degree. This autumn I’ll be studying two courses – Essential Mathematics as well as Physics & Space – I’m looking forward to both of them.
So I’m going to wrap up there for today. A bit of a different post for me with more of a traditional ‘blog’ feel I suppose. Rest assured I have other posts lined up from the world of aviation and science and I can’t wait to share them with you all very soon.
Dan Roach Flying Author 