Sorry for not writing lately - been so tied up this last week with work, tennis, swimming, eating and of course - sleeping!

It’s been a pleasure to get to know the new guys on course 69, the party was heaps of fun and we got to the beach last weekend to recover. We’ve been playing quite a bit of tennis recently - especially since we’ve got a tennis instructor on the new course! He had been coaching tennis before he came over to FTE. It’s nice to get some instruction - something which I’ve never had with tennis before. It’s amazing how much one can improve with a little bit of coaching. We played doubles on the weekend and again during the last week. I think I prefer doubles over singles - much more fun with more people. I bought another racquet, as the one I originally had, has a huge sweet spot, which made the ball quite difficult to control… and I wouldn’t want random tennis balls knocking out people outside the court!

Other than tennis, I’ve been re-learning - or I should say, re-gaining my confidence in swimming. I succeeded in managing to do just that yesterday, thanks to Mikhail! Took me a few weeks, but I got there! Now that I have my confidence back, I think I’ll be jumping into the pool more often.

Temperatures here have been really high - reaching the upper thirties and even through to 40 celcius. It’s such a contrast to the weather in UK - where they’ve been experiencing plenty of rainfall, which has caused floods. A matter that we’ve discussed in Meteorology as well.

I’ve not bothered to go out to the beach this weekend - the heat really exhausts me and I end up not doing much work as a result. Though I can get away with not doing much work at the moment, I don’t think I can for much longer, since we’ve got progress tests coming up in a few weeks. The plan is to continue to a little bit of work, but regularly to keep on top of things. I’m finding the concepts and material itself quite easy, but the volume of work is the difficulty - maybe not just yet, but I’ve no doubt it will be if it’s not managed.

I’m really enjoying the subjects, so motivation is not a problem at all. My favourite subject at the moment is Meteorology. Also, I find the subject Engines really illuminating - we’ve been taught all the theory behind engines in Physics, at University, but not much on the practical side. I really like how instructors demonstrate on and use real engine parts to explain concepts - it’s much easier to see what’s going on when looking at a 3D, real object, rather than a 2D diagram. For the subject of Instruments, we recently went down to the demonstration room to have a look at how gyroscopes work. Again, really useful, much easier to see how it works by having a look at one and playing around with it, rather than having a look at a diagram in a book.  It was also fun demonstrating conversation of angular momentum to by class mates by allowing a spinning bicycle wheel to spin me around on a swivelling chair!