To work for the morning. The way Saturday morning working is paid has been changed. We now don’t do Saturday mornings as overtime – we get time off in lieu. Or that is we get time off in lieu *if* we take that time off after we’ve worked the Saturday. If we take the time off before we work on the Saturday morning, we then get paid for the Saturday morning at time and a third.
Bearing in mind that if we operate this way we’ve taken off half a day unpaid beforehand, so we end up with a net profit of about one hour’s money. But it’s better than a poke up the bum with a sharp stick. And so I took the afternoon off in lieu of working tomorrow morning.
And so back to BatCamp. Through the rain. I’d spent the morning being jealous of those at camp whilst I worked. And as the rain came down torrentially I began to wonder if I’d had the better deal. I got to the farm just as the rain eased off, and made my way to the camp where I was just in time for lunch. To be honest, no matter when I arrived I would have been just in time for lunch – I’d been to the supermarket for the bread. A bottle of Shepherd Neame’s 4-4-2 washed down a bacon, tomato and halloumi baguette nicely, and I slept as the Rear Admiral washed up.
Having been woken by passing dogs, we went for an afternoon’s fishing. Despite the rain. The rain was rather heavy, but eased off as the afternoon went on. I caught a few fish, “Daddy’s Little Angel TM ” caught loads. The Bat (patent pending) nearly caught a rabbit (with a fishing rod), and the Hose Beast attempted to train ducks to herd fish.
All too soon the afternoon had gone. And so I left camp to go to astro club. I must admit that for some reason I wasn’t expecting great things from tonight’s club – being on the August bank holiday I was expecting attendance to be down. But I was pleasantly surprised. Billed as a telescope workshop and summer social, the evening was great.
Attendance was down on our usual turn-out, but with fifty people in attendance we had a really good guide to basic telescoping (from which I learned several new snippets). We had a really good social event – loads of people contributed food and goodies. And the impromptu telescoping session was great. I got to see Neptune and Jupiter. Jupiter was blobbling (a technical term). We saw the Andromeda galaxy, we saw all sorts of nebulae, and we even saw the new supernova in M101. And just as we were packing up, the lads managed to catch a small lizard.
The only drawback to the evening was that I’d forgotten to get raffle tickets…..
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