12:58 p.m. - 2004-01-04
Star Struck
Hola, dear diary. Well lots of astronomical activity right now. The Quadrantid meteor shower today - most easily seen in the east of North America. Jupiter has started retrograde activity - orbit appears to be going backward to ours - so start your diets and other "getting rid of bad habits" resolutions now. Shed those chains of excess, however you define them. I wonder if I can shed being broke right now. We'll see. Oh and Mercury moves from retrograde motion to direct Tuesday morning. Communication issues should start to smooth out and run without hitches - theoretically. I think Mercury stayed retrograde all last year for me. I'll take any improvement, thank you very much. At NASA this report on the shifting of the magnetic north pole - what does it mean?Migration. And finally, Elvis's birthday this week - my guys were asking me if I meant Costello or Stoijko (Canadian male figure skating champion). JRR Tolkien's birthday too. Well ok, the last couple don't have to do with astronomy but they do deal with stars.
I had a couple of strange dreams last night. The first dealt with my aboriginal friend. She seemed to have had another baby. He had been left to the care of her "aunties" while she looked for work. They were living in a home not far from where I grew up for part of my childhood. Two blocks from the university, a couple of miles from our football stadium and just a few miles from the outskirts of the city, near some medicine wheels left by the Blackfeet centuries ago. We went to have dinner with them and I brought a box of chocolates as a thank you. Dark chocolate with cherries in the middle. I don't like that type but I knew that the aunties did. Anyway, when we arrived, the aunties said that the baby had been abducted or lost. My friend and I went searching on the university grounds by the main freeway in the area. We found hime safely tucked away in a bus shelter that was masked by bushes and trees. Hard to find, but he had been sheltered there safely. It seemed to be late spring. April round here ya'll.
The scene shifted and I found myself at work. There was just me and the other contract working - the others seemed to be off in a meeting or something. I was going through some old files that had been "lost" or misplaced for some time. They had a lot of critical information in them, but the weird part was that it seemed to be the same data but for different days or times of the year. When I first started it appeared to be a lot of new documents that would have to be incorporated, but when I looked inside the file pockets the bulk was being created by the bottles of rum in each record. I couldn't really tell if they were all empty - the first few were - but there must have been about 30 of them. I pulled them all out and put the bottles in a safe place in a cupboard, thinking I could determine who they belonged to later. Big question was what were they doing hidden in the files? No answer to that question.
Woke up then. It's still very cold outside - current temperature about -23 C/-10 F - and I realized, as I slid out of bed, that the furnace must have cut off sometime during the night. No icicles hanging off the ceiling but darn close. Got the beast back running, but it took nearly an hour for it to be comfortably warm in the house again. Lucky the cats have their fur coats. They were happy to be let out of their "nursery this morning - headed for the Christmas tree first thing since they love playing in the branches. Miss Kitty on the other ohand has taken to heading for the main bathroom every chance she gets. You see it had two mirrors in there and she can't stop admiring her nice svelte kitty figure now that all signs of her pregnancy are gone. Cooing and chirruping emerge as she parades back and forth. Peacocks and Taurus' - hmmmmmmmmmm.
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