[Miscellaneous] Introducing.......me!

Welcome to my blog!

Let me introduce myself. My name's David, I'm 24, and I'm a hobby-holic. I have far too many of them for the amount of time that I have. In fact I frequently hear the phrase "how do you find time to do all of that?" What's that old saying? If you want something done, give it to a busy person to do? That's me all over.

I'm currently at the University of St Andrews, studying (hah!) for my PhD in astronomy; specifically, in the art of planet hunting. I'm a member of the WASP consortium, which is one of the biggest transiting planet searches around, and has members from universities around the UK. So far our tally of planets is up to 82, but it's increasing all of the time. I mostly enjoy my work. Life every job, and make no mistake, it is a full-time job (albeit one with a great deal more flexibility than most others), it has its ups and its downs.

Around that job I have many, many hobbies, hence the name of the blog. I'm a trained lifesaver and a member of the University's lifesaving club, where I help to train less experienced members. I also compete for the club as captain of the A-team. I play the bassoon, and have done for the last 10 years. I've been wargaming and roleplaying since I was 13, and playing computer games, mostly on consoles, for roughly the same amount of time. I enjoy cycling, swimming, reading, and watching rugby. As if all of that wasn't enough, I also love cars and motorsport (traits for which I entirely blame my Dad), and love following Formula 1, touring cars and sportscar racing; I'm off to Le Mans this year for the first time, and I can't wait.

In the last few months, particularly since the new year, I've started thinking about putting fingers to keyboard to talk about my life. More and more I've found myself considering the things that I'm doing, and wondering whether it would be worth keeping some kind of record of my thoughts and deeds for posterity. I don't flatter myself that this blog will be interesting to very many people; it's more of a way of organising my own ideas, and of modernising the concept of a diary. Sometimes I struggle to articulate my thoughts and feelings verbally, but I've always found it much easier in prose. Hopefully this will help me get across some of what I'm thinking about. In that respect this blog is more for myself than for anyone else, but there may be things of interest to other people in here I suppose.

As a start to this blog, I'll be writing a series of posts focused on all of these hobbies of mine. One per hobby over the next couple of weeks. After that, who knows. I can't promise (even to myself) that posts will be regular, but we'll see how it goes. I've actually been here before; I had a Livejournal a few years back, but that petered out. Fingers crossed that this lasts a bit longer :-)