UPDATE ON ME

Well it's been a pretty awesome week.

If anyone read my 'ME' post 5 days ago http://twinklespinalot.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/me_24.html they will know that I was pretty fired-up and ready to ruffle a few feathers.  The short answer to a long story is the day following that particular post and interview

I WAS ACCEPTED FOR A NEW JOB!

23 years without having had so much as an interview with a potato and bang, I nail it on the first run.  Not only that, I will be working locally in the aviation service industry which has always been of interest to me.  This is of course hugely exciting considering I have been working away managing an office, punching numbers on a screen and facing a slanting roof for 17 of those years, peppered with craning my neck out of a skylight to see whether the sun had come out and occasionally feeling like leaping out the 3rd floor.  Prior to that, 6 of those years in an even smaller room managing that business and running a household whilst everyone else appeared to live it up around me.

I came away from that interview on cloud 9, stratospheric and with renewed wings.  The feedback alone that day was exceptional before I had even been accepted.  My first impressions were "What a great company this seems to be".  

So my induction starts soon, my new job needs all the usual security passes which takes time and my goodness I am finally going to work in an environment that I have interest in.

via GIPHY

That day the wind was howling, the rain was sideways, my freshly straightened hair was squashed under a woolly hat, my shoes got wet and I lost a button on my suit. It didn't matter, nothing mattered except I had survived an interview after relatively little preparation, in a group at that.

Nana Twinkle has the wind in her sails

and fairy dust is optional

I'll leave you with this link to some funny interviews, I actually read these the morning of my interview to ease any tension I was feeling and get things into perspective a bit

Funny Interview Stories

ME

I never had the career I wanted, for many reasons.  Discouraged by teachers, distracted by love and then disarmed by circumstances.  I made do and then my children came along and I juggled being a mum with being a work at home to support a business venture.  I cooked, cleaned, wiped away tears, taxied to and fro in between phone calls, accounts, homework, housework and bedtime.  I wiped nosesies, tickled toesies, played your games, gardened, ironed, started work again, listened to woes, lost boyfriends, unhappy customers, sickness, moans and smiles, struggled along with little money and loads of ‘not good enough’ mixed with ‘you’re great, keep smiling’.   Now these things are done.

Today, is my first real job interview in the outside world for 27 years.  I am 53 and I would like to do something in my last 10-15 years of working life that suits me, that isn’t a work around for someone or something else.  It may not be the all singing, dancing, good-salary paying job that I wanted so long ago.  But it will be something that I have chosen to do and something that interests me.  It may not involve any of my current talents or capabilities as everyone is so quick to point out to me at every opportunity “you could do better than this, you are hugely talented”.

Yes I could, yes I could have done 30 years ago, yes I love writing, yes I love Art, yes I love space and science, yes I love gardening, yes I love astronomy, yes I love making things.   Now my talents are my hobbies and I enjoy them more that way.   It stops me from the massive regrets of not pursuing them harder when I became so distracted with other things and just getting by and carrying on regardless.  This may be a hard concept to grasp and any job I take may not be 9-5 and fit around anyone else.  Now is my time to shine.  Now is my time to do something else.  Now you are all on your own.  My support hasn’t ended, it has just been diminished whilst I pick up what is left of myself.

Some will understand, some will throw their hands up in horror and some will just give me a hard time regardless.  Some will not even bother to read this.

Let me be me.

Anyone feel like unfriending or unfollowing me?  Go ahead...make my semi-centennial.

Anyone want to leave a crass comment?  Be my guest but be warned I’m capable of blocking and reporting mass-spam, hate inciting, religious freaks on Twitter and getting them shutdown, I can extend it to nutters anywhere else too.

Anyone want to be kind, thoughtful, happy and supportive here?   Welcome to my world, come in and have a seat.

To all the employers and jobs that I applied to on the Indeed website and received a response, thank you for your time.

To all the employers and jobs that I applied to on the Indeed website that couldn't be bothered, thank you for reminding me of the losers in this world.

I will be at Stansted Airport most of lunchtime being interviewed, if you've missed the opportunity to speak with an extremely talented woman, there is still time and I can be contacted on social media quite easily.

My mind may not be made up on a single job position today, but my mind is made up on one thing:  This is MY life, my choices, my way.

EVERYTHING MATTERS

I don't know about you but last night's Sky at Night programme (14 Jan 2018 - The Invisible Universe) raised more questions than answers for me.  Further I don't pretend to be able to answer them either and I'm not sure there are many people on Earth can really say with authority that they KNOW what dark matter and dark energy actually looks like or behaves like.  For one thing our primitive eyes have not evolved enough to be able to see this stuff, we have to resort to other means to find it in the first place, including large facilities underground shielded from radiation.

Some of you may remember in November 2015 I attended an event at London's Tate Modern for a series of walks, talks and workshops staged as part of the International Year of Light.  I blogged about this in 2 parts covering the whole day in summary.  If that kind of thing ever turns up again, I will tweet the living daylights out of it because the whole day was very engaging and enlightening and unmissable.

Last night's programme gave a little more glimpse into the weird world of dark matter and dark energy, but as ever it was not enough for me.  To begin with let's take a look at the model and how our universe is perceived both seen and (arguably) unseen.

Watch this before reading any further, its a bit quirky but this is the Universe for 'dum dums' like me and you in 4 minutes

Now what this video doesn't do is give an insight into how light actually works, so I'm going to refer you back to my Light and Dark Matters blog part 2 here to get the ball rolling.

LIGHT AND DARK MATTERS PART 2

And then...have a little read of this, it's a few pages long but worth reacquainting yourself with the subject of light...don't forget to come back here 😜

William Harris & Craig Freudenrich, Ph.D. "How Light Works" 10 July 2000. HowStuffWorks.com. <https://science.howstuffworks.com/light.htm> 15 January 2018

The actual scale of our Universe is hard for us to get our heads around because well, some of us have trouble with getting around our own county let alone something billions of light years across.  Were we ever mean't to travel at the speed of light if we could because, actually, we are made of light too.  We are made of the very stuff of stars.  Our bodies reflect and absorb light.  How many times have you sat in the sunshine feeling it's warmth for a few minutes after a cold, long winter and thinking "Yeah, I can accomplish anything now!".  That's because physically your body is absorbing Vitamin D which you can't get from eating certain foods alone.  Just 10 minutes in the sun is enough to boost energy levels for healthy bone structure, boost brain activity and reduce inflammation.  Ever felt run down, tired or constantly battling a cold?  Not enough sunshine my friends!

The Universe scale is so large that we may never actually know how far the whole thing goes, at the end of this video below is a depiction of other possible universes, but does it end there?  Is that the 'brick wall' of Universes and nothing else?

In the Sky at Night programme they talked about dark matter and energy pushing and pulling at the fabric of the universe.  I imagine a network of substance rather like a carbon nanotube.  We're informed that gravity has a great part to play with dark matter and in fact I asked the question on Twitter following the programme, given Maggie's analogy with the turntable and marble spinning off it, if matter can escape the gravity and in turn our Milky Way and yes, given enough energy it could but what part does dark matter or energy have in holding all the threads (galaxies, hot spots, stars) together and therefore stopping matter spinning out?  Also, galaxies are known to collide, what is going on with dark matter then, does it 'throw a sickie' and crawl away when this process happens?!

Further we were informed that the Universe's expansion is speeding up, this has been mooted for some time, now we are being told that dark energy has something to do with it until we end up coming to what the Sky at Night so wonderfully termed "The Big Crunch" as opposed to "The Big Bang".  Supposedly 70% of the Universe's energy is this stuff and we can't actually see it?  Maybe that's why we're unlikely to ever travel to the Proxima Centauri, unless we can project ourselves to it somehow without encountering the speed of light or any of this dark stuff we can't see.

Given that we are ourselves made of light, every fibre of our being comes from light, even our thoughts are made of light matter charged particles giving off energy.  By increasing our knowledge of the cosmos, improving our brains, advancing our technologies are WE actually accelerating the expansion process?  Is this actually a battle between dark matter and light matter this pulling and pushing process?  Rather than dark energy and dark matter winning this battle, is light matter winning it?  Which is the strongest substance?  Further, if we end up not alone in this Universe and there are others also increasing their knowledge, evolution etc, then could this be the reason behind the acceleration too?  Like a critical mass of light energy hammering away at all the dark energy screaming

 "Set me free, allow me to soar

Stretch out my wings like I have never done before..."

credit: Francisco Guzman

I said I had more questions than answers!
I also said I'd push a few buttons...feel free to discuss and bounce theories and ideas around, but don't go overboard with the technical terms, because as Albert Einstein once said "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it enough"