It's Friday and, because of my weekend rotation schedule, I get to stay home! The rest comes not a moment too soon. It was a busy and stressful week. Some things take care of themselves: no change in my job/career situation (for better or worse) as the decision was made for me. Projects at work don't usually resolve themselves: after many hours of troubleshooting I finally devised a workaround for an intranet site problem and that made a few people happy. Now my coworkers can create their paperwork without paper. At least there will be less paper wasted. Finally the week was capped off by an 11-hour day partly spent "upgrading" our PC scheduling system followed by a 9-hour day yesterday watching our networked PCs gradually grind to a halt because the "upgrade" was somehow toxic. Fortunately I hadn't tried to permanently improve all of our PCs at the same time. Of course it wasn't the software vendor's fault — no, no, no! My repeated and increasingly urgent calls for help went unanswered. Hmmm… their phone was busy all day. I wonder….. I finally remedied the situation myself, at least for a while, by shutting off the automatic portion of the "upgrade" and rebooting our PCs allowing them to regress to their stable former, non-upgraded selves. Those machines that suffered the permanent effects of the "upgrade" are hosed; I'll have to try and repair them Monday. Very stressful day. Not a nice week. I hope I don't get phone calls today… I need this day (and weekend) off! Thank Goodness It's Friday!
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I got to work just fine today (my weekend to work). No real trouble getting up the hill out of our condos. Our city streets were packed snow but the state roads were fine as were the freeways. When I arrived the snow crews were on the property in force. They'd cleared the lots pretty well but the drive-up window couldn't be driven up to. This photo will give some idea of what they had to work on. Tomorrow ought to be pretty easy by comparison! A pretty, snowy day, or a pretty snowy day!
The weather forecasters got this one entirely correct for us: this morning we woke to about a foot of snow on the ground, piled up higher, in places, by moderate winds. Pretty, in some ways, but good motivation to stay indoors and do the things we should be doing. I managed to complete my publishing project Friday and mail it off to the printers before the roads got too bad — bought provisions, too, at a store unusually busy with shoppers doing the same. I was supposed to be at work today, but they did not open today due to the severe weather. That left today for me to create and publish the Web version of the same project. Whew! Done at last. (At least until I take delivery of the finished product.) I took a break during the day to dig us out of the winter wonderland at least temporarily. She Who Must Be Obeyed spent a good part of the day cleaning house –essentially sterilizing the bathrooms– finding herself exhausted by late afternoon. I'll be doing the cooking and, at Her request, it will be baked spaghetti. Add a little Ravenswood Zinfandel and we'll have a nice little dinner. I'll bet we watch The Simpsons Movie tonight. All in all, it'll have been a good Saturday — a busy, snowy day!
UPDATE: Dinner was pretty much as expected except we enjoyed glasses of Rabbit Ridge Bunny Cuvee with our baked spaghetti and broccoli and She insisted I make oatmeal cookies. Very comforting meal, that! At about 8 PM I went out to shovel the sidewalk to "keep up." I was greeted by another eight inches of fresh snow and drifts as high as this afternoons! You mightn't have believed me if I'd said I'd dug that car out earlier! So I dug it out again. The saving grace was the snow, having fallen in 20 to 23 degree temps, was fluffier than before. Still… a three-foot drift is a lot of snow. That's all for tonight!
Leaving the office I was treated to one last look at our ice-coated world. A lonely tree in the parking lot was all decked out in diamonds under a nearby overhead light. The color in the photo couldn't be corrected to my satisfaction so I removed it entirely and just as well! I like the resulting photo much better than any color rendition — and it matches my memory of the scene. It reminds me of my "good old days" of black & white film photography.
These have been harsh days full of hard weather, hard decisions, and plenty of work. An ice storm hit our area of Northeastern Ohio late in the day March 4 and overnight into the morning of March 5. Roads were hazardous and a mess to drive. By late in the day a few breaks in the overcast opened and let sunshine light the scene — trees and plants of every description were coated in diamond-ice — and, for a while, beauty reigned. This sort of thing is hard to record with a camera, especially if you can't devote a lot of time to it. I was supposed to be working so I dedicated a 15-minute break to a very fast photo project. It was refreshing. By tomorrow afternoon it will all be gone and I'll be back to the daily grind, my eternally nearly-complete publishing project, and, potentially, a tough career/life decision.
I spent Saturday night at the observatory… it was our local observance of the Saturn Observation Campaign's Saturn Observation Night. The ringed planet was very near opposition and, after a partly-cloudy day, we were treated to a chilly but clear night. Saturn shown like a yellow diamond in the east and was, as always, a crowd-pleaser in the eyepiece. Seeing was fairly good (not excellent) and we could spot four moons, see the space between the inside of the rings and the limbs of the planet, and got regular glimpses of banding in the planetary atmosphere. In all 33 people of a wide range of ages visited the observatory and looked through the telescope. Most didn't stick around; after seeing Saturn they took off for home — probably because it was a cold 28 degrees in the dome. Many also were treated to views of the Orion Nebula and eight late-comers climbed high on a ladder to see the rising, waning gibbous Moon.
Sweetie and I woke Sunday to a strange smell in the air. I thought it was Her hand, smelly from working with garlic the night before. No, it wasn't that! We searched the house for the source of the acrid, garlic-vinegar stench but to no avail: not the trash bag, not the garbage disposer, not the cat box, not anything we could find. It occurred to me that it might be the solenoid actuator on the heat pump's humidifier overheating and failing. I shut off the humidifier and we opened the house briefly to air the place out. There's still a hint of the odor here but it's tolerable now. This may be a mystery stink for a while… at least until we have the heat pump looked at for routine service.
My Mom has spinal surgery tomorrow. I'll be headed over there to greet her in recovery. It's not a particularly high-risk procedure but that sort of thing is always a worry!
After a day or two of nail-biting, monitoring forecasts of sky conditions, the Clear Sky Clock tipped the scales for me… Wednesday night's sky would be clear and we would be able to see the Feb. 20 total lunar eclipse.
I packed up only one extra eyepiece –the great antique scope has a wonderful low-power ocular that presents the entire lunar disk– and bundled myself up. It was a c-o-l-d night!
As the eclipse was getting underway a freshly-cleared sky began to cloud up. A thin layer of cloudiness obscured all detail from the Moon just as Earth's shadow was taking a good chunk out. And a little snow fell through the dome slit! Gad! Just as I was beginning to give up hope, however, the sky quickly cleared and we had good seeing for the rest of the night!
The view of the Moon through the 9-inch refractor was typically spectacular. Even the full Moon looks great through that scope with its fist-sized eyepiece. During the partial phase of the eclipse, however, there was a time when the lunar limb was relatively bright, the central portion of the disk was bluish, and the dark shadowed region took on a reddish hue. Quite beautiful. During totality the Moon took on a pale coppery color; it was not a particularly colorful eclipse. Impressive and beautiful, nonetheless.
In all more than 44 visitors came into the observatory — there were probably more but people were coming in to look through the telescope and going out to enjoy the sky with their own eyes … they were getting into the event!
The last visitors left at around 11 PM and I was finally free to try some photos. A little too late, however, to get the shot I wanted… looking at the Moon along the telescope and through the dome. The Moon had already brightened to the point that I couldn't balance the exposure. It's a nice photo anyway and I'll use it for some things, it's just not the picture I had imagined. It was getting late and my feet and hands were getting cold –it was 18 degrees F. in the dome– so I closed up and went home.
A very good night of eclipse watching.
Tonight when Sweetie got home she found Missy in desperate condition. I won't go into details but it was obvious Missy was very near death. We called the vet's office and took Missy in for evaluation but we all pretty much knew what had to happen. The choices were: extreme efforts to save her life, natural death at home, euthanasia. No good choices. Missy has been in poor health for some time and "heroic" measures pretty much equated to torture. A natural death promised to be lingering and hard. So we wound up asking Dr. G. to end Missy's life. Missy left us at about 6:30 tonight having lived nearly to the age of 18 (we thought she was a bit older but our records say otherwise). She had been with Sweetie and me through most of our marriage. Missy was a great cat.
So what do you do in this digital age with the excellent lenses you purchased over the years for your 35mm film camera? Well one thing is you can purchase an adapter from an Australian company that will mate your beautiful Minolta 250mm f/5.6 RF Rokkor-X mirror lens with your trusty Philips ToUcam Pro II Web camera. What you get from that is a very good Web cam with excellent optics for all sorts of uses — especially in getting "live" images from a telescope into a computer and, potentially, on to the Web.
Years ago I used the ToUcam to do a live Webcast of a total lunar eclipse. I'd connected it to my trusty Meade 390 telescope — a 1,000mm focal length scope. The result was nice imagery of only a portion of the lunar disk. I'd wanted the entire disk to show! With shorter focal lengths I can now image the entire face of the Moon or, with proper filtration, the Sun.
I did my first test imaging with the rig tonight at 7:22 PM with the Moon in its waxing gibbous phase. The image shown here (test imaage #5) was done with the Toshiba Microsoft Vista notebook computer, CoffeeCup Software's Webcam 4.0, the ToUcam and 250mm telephoto lens. Looks good! Not quite as sharp as I remember the Meade images, but not bad for a first try! Mount this rig to a telescope with a clock drive and we'll have something!
Had to work yesterday. Had to work today. That's weekend rotation for you. Still, I sometimes don't mind it much… the pace of the day is different from the weekdays and I can often pursue projects that I can't during the week. This weekend I spent a lot of my time working out the last kinks in our new public computer print management system. We were supposed to be able to offer printing services to visitors who bring their own notebook computers with them. As we finished up the system installation we hit a snag… the visiting notebook module wouldn't print through our system. After a lot of troubleshooting we determined it was some component apparently missing from our server. I spent several hours Saturday working on the problem. Today I discovered the problem and how to resolve it. Years ago, when I originally set up the server for work in the Internet, I had made a number of changes for security's sake. Unfortunately, I hadn't documented them! Today I rediscovered what I had done {geek alert} I had set the hidden device NetBIOS to Disabled which, in turn, shut off Windows File and Printer Sharing — the service critical to success of the notebook project. Yeah… the HIDDEN device! So, after closing and a server reboot, success at last! Visitors will now, with great ease, bring their notebook computers to our facility and, with a lightweight and temporary software download, print to our networked printers! Just a couple of tweaks remain to the network setup so that wired as well as wireless users can access the system and we're all set. Are you still awake?
Newsy Bits: I think my efforts (above) were aided by finally getting a full and restful night's sleep — the first I've had in about a week! She and I braved temperatures in the teens, strong winds, and blowing snow to go out to breakfast and grocery shopping this morning before I had to go to work. She is recovering after a week-long fight with a cold virus. Very nasty. Tonight She's feeling much better and, so far, I'm showing no signs of infection. Tasha has been throwing up which had me worried. I'm hoping the fix is as simple as this: she really dislikes some new litter box filler we've tried to switch to and I suspect she's not been using it. I think she's been holding back (if cats can do that) and it's been making her regurgitate. We'll see. I cooked dinner (pesto pasta and corn) and baked cookies (chocolate chip) tonight. Temperature has fallen to the low single-digits (+3.6 degrees F right now). Good thing the sky is cloudy: keeps it from getting even colder and saves me the guilty feelings of not going out under a clear sky and freezing my stuff off. And it's approaching 11 PM and time, soon, for bed. Still reading this? Hmmm. Are you still awake?
PhotonStopper 