While I generally try to leave my personal life out of this blog, this one sentence description needs to be shared: My husband tried to replace a bathroom facet and managed to catch the wall on fire. I blog to you from the secondary story hallway floor outside the bathroom where I am sitting with a fire extinguisher (the pin is pulled). There is currently water coming out the ceiling of the kitchen below.

Really. I’m not kidding.

Ok. Now that I’ve got that out of my system… Dragon*Con. The wonderful Derek over at Skepticality arranged for me to be part of the podcasting track at Dragon*Con (and he also arranged for me to be on these week’s episode of his show – check it out ). I’ll be arriving at the Con mid-day Friday, and my schedule is as follows:

Friday, 10pm, Space & Science Track: Panel – Apollo hoax theories & other Astronomical Urban Legends (Forsythe – Hilton)
Saturday, 11am, Podcasting Track: Panel – Podcasting in the Classroom (Jackson / Carter – Hilton)
Saturday, 4pm, Podcasting Track: Astronomy Cast LIVE! with a very special guest (Jackson / Carter – Hilton)
Saturday, 7pm, Parsec Awards (Hyatt – Regency 5) Astronomy Cast is up in 2 categories!
Sunday, 10am, Space & Science Track: The Improbable Universe (Henry – Hilton)
Sunday, 8:30pm, Podcasting Track: Panel – PodSci Panel (Jackson / Carter – Hilton)

The complete Space & Science schedule is here and the complete podcasting track schedule is here.

In addition to the above, I also want to find at least one opportunity to where my random hominid alien costume. (Yes, pictures will be provided).

Monday, we’re (my husband is tagging along) leaving mid-day to  fly home. Then, Tuesday I’m going to the EPO meeting for more fun. At that meeting I’m part of the following:

Wednesday, all day: Poster – It Takes an e-Village (Cain, Gay, Foster, Plait)
Wednesday, 10:30-11:20am: Your Face(book) and MySpace: Let’s Hook Up (Gay, Foster)
Thursday, all day: Poster – Using New Media to reach Broad Audiences (IYA New Media Team)

There will also be all day meetings Friday and Saturday (after the meeting) for the International Year of Astronomy, which will include the unveiling of the new IYA website (designed by me )

So life is busy, but fun (ignoring the smoldering wood in my bathroom – which will hopefully stop smoldering soon. When this set of trips is over, I’ll get to settle into just teaching and podcasting for awhile while I replace the wall in my bathroom. I always wanted to learn how to install wainscoting …

And, just as I finished this, the fire alarm went off for the first time. I think I need to replace that (especially since I just used a broom to knock it off the ceiling in pieces to shut it up – 10ft ceilings have their drawbacks).

<small>may I scream now?</small>

For the next year, I’m going to try an experiment. I love teaching, I love creating New Media, and I research. I can’t do any of these three things well if I try and pretend to do one full time and the other two part-time. Thus, to enable myself to do what I love in the proportions that I love them, I’m going to not teach at all this summer, and starting in the fall, I’m going to be part-time faculty at SIUE.

What exactly does that mean, and why are the changes needed? Well, this semester I taught 4 hours of physics lecture (60 students), 3 hours of astronomy lecture (36 students), and 6 hours of lab. I only had a grader for lab. This meant that I spent a little over 40 hours per week preparing to teach, answering student questions during office hours, teaching, grading, and preparing assignments. In addition to teaching for SIUE, I’ve also been working with students from SAO. I love my students, but when I see them more waking-hours each week then I see my husband, I am teaching too much. On top of that teaching load, I’ve been working on Astronomy Cast, this little blog, and I’ve occasionally been writing for Sky and Telescope.

As part of my required university paperwork, I had to add up how much time I spend each week on different tasks. When faced with that form and a painfully honest look at my life, I realized I was spending 80+ hours a week doing work. The teaching and occasional writing, I did for my paycheck, and everything else I did because I loved it. After talking with my software engineer of a husband for a while, we decided to I should take a risk and see if I could find ways to bring in income blogging and podcasting. I’ll still keep working with SAO, and I’ll be teaching one 4-credit lecture class and team teaching another in the fall at SIUE. Teaching just won’t be as all-consuming as it was this year. Going part time is a risk, but is one that I’m hoping will prove worthwhile.

This is a one year experiment that has me planning to take this blog daily, and has me looking for grants, looking for sponsors, and has me looking to the Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait as proof that sometimes this experiment can have a positive outcome. We’ll see what happens. I’m grateful to those of you who have been here since the beginning, and I’m hoping that in the next few days and weeks I’ll convince you to tell all your friends about this site and all that it will have to offer.

It’s a slow news week. It appears everything was saved up for the AAS meeting, and now the well of discoveries runs dry. Comet McNaught is the media wonder child of the moment, but from here in the way too cold mid-West, all I can say is “I see clouds.”

On a separate note, I was interviewed by Aaron Price of Slackapedia Galactica, and a former colleague from Slacker Astronomy. You can find the interview here.