The year's a bit slow to get going

In an extremely traditional action for a thoroughly unfit 42-year-old, I signed up at the local gym in Bedford (20 minutes' walk from the flat, a decent pool and lots of machines) and spent 90 minutes there this morning. It's more expensive than the gym on campus, but it's a lot bigger, it has a pool which the campus one doesn't, and it doesn't require the logistics of carrying gym kit and packed lunch around campus all day and then timing things very precisely to hit the hourly evening buses back to Bedford.

I had an exam on the 3rd (rocket engines, it went reasonably) and have one on the 10th ('systems engineering', the way that spacecraft have mass and power budgets which are very tight and through which everything you might want a spacecraft to do interacts); teaching starts up on the 13th, with four-hour sessions on advanced astrodynamics each day starting at 9am (meaning I need to be on the 0750 bus), so I've got a week in which I should work on the group design project.