The Staff have been working hard on her next book, but she always has me to help her with grammar and the occasional bout of writers block. I am very demanding.  

Suw and I are out with a friend, and we met at a coffee shop in Leather Lane in Clerkenwell, Prufock’s. It’s very much of a coffee geek’s coffee shop with Japanese coffee syphons and other esoteric coffee hardware. The coffee isn’t too bad, but it does taste a bit carmel-y to me. Oh well, here’s a bit of coffee geek photography for you to enjoy.

I’m probably breaking the rules of Ada Lovelace Day by blogging about Suw twice in the short few years of the day to remember women in science and technology, but as her husband, I’ll claim a special dispensation. That disclaimer aside, I really do want to pay tribute to her.

A few years ago, after being to yet another tech conference where women were poorly represented, she had finally had enough. (She was once asked to blog a conference because in the words of the organiser, he heard she “could type well”.) As with other issues she is passionate about, she decided to do something about it so she decided to create Ada Lovelace Day, a day that encourages people to write about women in science and technology who have inspired them.

I must admit to being initially sceptical. Isn’t there some committee at Hallmark, the greeting card company,  that gets to just make up special observances on a whim? However, it’s one of the many things that I love about Suw that she just decides to do things. She really is a social entrepreneur, someone who sees something that needs doing and just does it.

As her husband, I’ve seen how she has worked to make this day what it has become. This year she drew on friends and supporters to really increase the scope of the day. Their help has been invaluable. For the first few years, I saw her struggle to get things off the ground largely by herself, but this year, the day really felt like it had reached a critical moment. I want to thank her friends and also the team at E-Vectors who helped her build such a great site this year to highlight all of the great stories of women in science and technology.

I can’t really do justice to how proud I am of Suw. Some day, I hope that a woman comes up to her and says that after reading a story on Ada Lovelace Day it inspired her to become an astrophysicist, a computer scientist or a geologist. Here’s to Suw, my wife, a woman in technology, who has the audacity to see something that needs doing and does it.

Suw in Brugge (from our first Christmas together)

Three years ago, I was in the US for two months to cover the elections. Suw and I had just been married in February, and she supported me in doing what I loved. (She also supported me in doing what I knew I had to do even when support and direction were in short supply from my keepers.) Being away for so for long, she made me a recording of her reading Neil Gaiman’s Stardust to me.

It helped me feel closer to home. Unless we’re too tired, we read to each other. We’ve read so many books to each other.

I’m travelling. Again. I’ve been travelling on and off since July, and after this almost solid five weeks of travel, I’ll be travelling on and off now through the end of the year. Thankfully, after these five weeks, I’ll be home almost as much as on the road.

While looking for something to watch or listen to, I found all of those recordings from Suw, made now three years ago. I’m listening to her again and feeling just that little bit closer to home, that little bit closer to her.

By Sir Mewton

This is my happy face because the Butler is coming home. I say this all the time on Twitter because he travels so much. The Staff doesn’t like it anymore than Grabbity and me, but she also says that he’s working hard for us so that soon we can have a house with a yard. We don’t know entirely what that means, but the Staff explained to us that a yard is like our balcony but much bigger and with real grass. That’s kind of exciting. I’d like a bit more room to chase sister Grabbity around.

We do miss him when he’s gone. The Staff is wonderful and everything, but she’s not as tall as The Butler. I can’t poke at the bugs on the ceiling unless the Butler is around. That’s my absolute favourite thing to do. He’ll be home tomorrow The Staff says. Yay. Apart from letting me play with the bugs on the ceiling, I’m also looking forward to cuddling him, but the Staff says that I have to get in line because she wants to cuddle him first.

The Butler told me that I was spending too much time napping and lying about the house. He suggested that I get a hobby. I thought that lying on the balcony instead of the house was a perfectly good hobby, but he said that simply changing where I was napping wasn’t what he had in mind. It might be that he’s a writer that he suggested that I start writing too. He also said it would be a nice way to post more pictures of myself. There can never be too many of those. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy this, and hopefully I will too.

The picture was the Butler’s suggestion. I think it’s a bit embarassing showing off baby pictures, but he thought you might find it cute. I’ll let you be the judge.

Growing up I had a set of Space Shuttle posters on my walls with the oddly triumphant tagline: “Going to work in space.” It was as if the Shuttle were a space station wagon commuting between the Cape and orbit.

I bought them on a visit in the early 1980s to Nasa in Washington DC, and that visit inspired me to study aeronautical and astronautical engineering. I gave that up after a year because my curiosity was a bit too broad. It’s a lull, but I have a feeling it won’t be long and the next small step will be even bolder.

I haven’t forgot those space dreams, although they seem even more distant than when I was a young boy. However, I had other dreams when I was young of travelling the world as a journalist. Those have come to pass in ways that I could have never imagined. I’m not counting my dream to go to space out just yet.

Via Flickr:
Space Shuttle Atlantis (STS-135) is seen atop a Mobile Launcher Platform (MLP) just prior to beginning its journey from High Bay 3 in the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39a for its final flight, Tuesday evening, May 31, 2011, at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. The 3.4-mile trek, known as "rollout," will take about seven hours to complete. Atlantis will carry the Raffaello multipurpose logistics module to deliver supplies, logistics and spare parts to the International Space Station. The launch of STS-135 is targeted for July 8. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

I’ve been on the road so much this year. It’s been a year since I took a buyout (voluntary redundancy in British) from The Guardian. Suw and I count our blessings that in the hangover from The Great Recession, that we’re actually more financially secure now than when I worked for The Guardian. It’s not something that a lot of people can say.

The one downside is a lot of travel and time away from home. I miss Suw so much, and I miss our kitties. I’m very glad that she and this big guy will be home to greet me tomorrow night.

I passed over some stormy weather on my flight from Sydney to Hong Kong last week. The pilot had to change course, but fortunately, the turbulence wasn’t too bad.

I just got back from Australia, and over the weekend, I took the ferry from Circular Quay in central Sydney to Manly Beach. Just a short walk south of Manly is Shelly Beach, a small relaxed beach with a small park. We walked down to this rocky outcrop to watch surfers and feel the fresh breeze off of the ocean. The eroded rocks were beautiful in the late afternoon sun.