My mind, and the places it goes

A coworker friend of mine just told me about this project, and my first thought was "Wow. Neal would have a *field day* planning a job in that building. But how would he convince Peter that Korea should be in his radius?"

I was sitting in my cube at 1:55 this afternoon and felt slight shaking. The shaking intensified, and I asked my across-the-cube-wall neighbor if he'd felt anything. He had, as had others in the open-plan office space. Neighbor (I'll call him A.) went to the USGS Earthquake Hazards site and reported that there had been a quake with its epicenter in Virginia. mabfan called just as I was about to text him to see if he felt anything, and he had. He checked in with the babysitter and I checked in on lcmlc and Abba (they didn't even feel the shaking).

I hope those of you closer to the epicenter are OK.

ETA: Gotta love the modern age. Texted with beckyfeld and confirmed all OK by her (phone lines are clogged).

-- Today we have snow. Again. Numbers I'm seeing right now indicate that we got somewhere around another 9 or so inches. Which is not such a large snowfall for our area, in general. Problem is, there's nowhere to *put* the snow when you clear it off roads/sidewalks/stairs/driveways due to the lingering snow from the last storm (and the storm before that... the storm before *that* melted when we had a couple of days in the low 40s).

-- We continued the flow of objects in the Great Clothing (and Stuff) Continuum by passing along a baby swing that has been, for Muffin and Squeaker, just an oddity in the living room/play room for about eight months. I have mixed feelings when we do this -- I feel good, knowing that I am letting another family get the enjoyment of the use of the item, but at the same time I feel nostalgic about when our girls used it.

-- Last night, thanks to the kindness of a friend willing to babysit, mabfan and I met Mike Brown, the discoverer of Eris (and killer of Pluto). mabfan has a write-up of our evening.

-- Earlier this week, when the low temperature in Boston was -2F, I knit myself a hat, because I decided it was silly that I had made warm hats for a number of people but did not have a good warm hat for myself. Now I am knitting another octopus, this one for the almost-six-month-old upstairs.

-- Still questing for good winter boots to replace my eight-year-old ones (the zippers have been through too much salt and sand and don't reliably zip any more). My requirements are relatively simple: waterproof, warm, not too expensive. I bought a pair that I was assured were waterproof, and they leaked like a sieve the first time I wore them in last week's wet-mush storm ("wet mush" in this case, was a combination of rain and show and slush that made crazy puddles all over Brookline).

-- I woke up this morning at about 3:20 to discover I was wearing my glasses. The bizarre thing about this is that I have a distinct memory of putting my glasses away and rolling onto my side to fall asleep, and that on-my-side position is not comfortable when I am still wearing my glasses. So sometime between when I fell asleep and 3:20, I must have woken up, opened my glasses case, put on my glasses, and gone back to sleep.

...celebrate Pesach!

(link goes to YouTube video)

Thanks to tpau for the link.

Scene: gnomi is talking to lcmlc and Abba about lcmlc's current issues with Thoracic Outlet Compression.

lcmlc: Abba says it shouldn't be "thoracic," but "jurassic"*

Abba: Jurassic Outlet -- the place to get your low-priced dinosaurs!


*There's a tradition of this in Jewish biblical exegesis. There are passages in the Talmud and other rabbinic writings where they say, to bring a lesson (in that they don't actually believe we're misreading the text, but that a small change in the text allows them to bring another lesson. The Hebrew that introduces these are "Al tikra _____ ella ______."

Oh, and Omer, day 12.

With thanks to mabfan for the link (and he got it from blergeatkitty)...

Penguin in a wetsuit!

I know, I know it's serious.

Omer, day 5

Tonight, from 22:19 to 22:26, mabfan and I went out into the -2 degree C weather to look at the total eclipse of the heartmoon.

This is the best of the bunch of photos I took with my little digital camera. Click to zoom in; you can see the moon pretty well.

And then we came inside, because we are fond of our toes.

(Inappropriate icon, but it's the closest I have to "astronomy.")

-- It's so weird being in the office on a Thursday. I'm just saying.

-- I'm very bad at not working while eating lunch at my desk. I have to get better about that.

-- Apples in New England in the fall are wonderful. ::CRUNCH::

-- This weekend we've got a problem: we've got baseball in Boston in October, but it's the week of Parshat Noach (the week in which we read the Torah portion about the story of Noah), and it almost always rains for Parshat Noach.

-- At Young Israel on Yom Kippur, people were asking me, "So... how's your planet?" It's been a year since the article, but people still ask.

-- Note to chick-what-packed-our-leftovers: writing "chicken" on the top of the carryout container as an identifier of the contents is not so helpful when both of us had chicken leftovers.

-- I work well with deadlines. Really I do. But do I really need *three* between 12 October and 24 October? I think not. And that's just my work-work deadlines. Freelance deadlines are an entirely different animal altogether ("They're an entirely different animal.")

-- In the end, I *did* end up getting the Nine action figure. He's standing next to Ten, with Jack on Ten's other side (and, as it happens, Daniel Jackson standing behind them holding a zat gun).

-- What does it mean when someone writes something one way in a manuscript and then votes the opposite way in my polls?

-- I'm knitting another Dalek. This one will be beige with black Dalek bumps.

-- Is a Dalek bump anything like the Colbert bump?

-- I'm pondering doing an Erev Shabbat Jewish Blogging post about the difference between work and melacha (the categories of "work" disallowed on Shabbat).

-- So, I'm back in the office, which means that my schedule will be normalizing.

-- Also, my laptop has been repaired and will be coming home tonight, thus returning me to normal communications at home.

-- We still have no new stove, much to the consternation of many, but I was assured last night that I should be coming home this evening to find a new stove in my kitchen. Which is good, because it's predicted to top out at about 18 degrees today. And since that's too cold for my oven to function, we're dependent on the microwave until such time as my new stove appears.

-- Yesterday was The Great Pluto Debate, and it was quite an interesting event. Over 250 people showed up to hear the debate, and I can now say that I have shared a stage and a conversation with Brian Marsden and Owen Gingerich, as well as Arsen Hajian of the US Naval Observatory; Andy Cheng, Principal Investigator for the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) for the New Horizons Mission to Pluto; Gareth Williams, Associate Director of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics; Kelly Beatty, Executive Editor of Sky and Telescope magazine; and mabfan.

-- As mentioned above, the weather today is good for penguins and polar bears and that's about it. It was 10 degrees when I left home, 9 when I got to the office, and it's now back up to 10. With the wind, it feels like -17, they're saying. Brrrrrrrrr!

Quick media announcement for those of you following Michael and me as we fight for Pluto:

CBS 4 News in Boston is doing a story on us and on the Society for the Preservation of Pluto as a Planet! According to our sources, the segment will be broadcast as part of the 5 PM local news on Wednesday, November 29 (that's tomorrow). Michael and I were interviewed for the segment, discussing our love of Pluto and why we think the IAU's definition of a planet is flawed.

If you miss the segment, it will be placed on the Channel 4 website at http://cbs4boston.com after the broadcast. We'll try to provide folks with an exact link.