I went to school in Dublin where I studied English, Irish, French, mathematics, chemistry, and technical drawing - I only started studying physics at university. I then went to The Queen's University of Belfast to do an M.Sc. in Opto-electronics and ended up spending 4 months in the Canary Islands doing my thesis.
Life can sometimes be very cruel.
I've spent the last 2 years looking at how the solar atmosphere changes with height and also at how small bright points or 'blinkers' evolve using the SOHO satellite. The best part of my work has been helping to build an eclipse experiment which our team took to the Caribbean to observe the 1998 eclipse. For the 1999 eclipse we hope to go to south western Europe or even to the middle east. Unfortunately I've got my head in the clouds for this answer too. I currently 'only' jump from 3,500 feet but will hopefully qualify to do free-falls in the near future.