Since I broke my TIC series chain at 12 yesterday, I start series D today. And today’s is about taking the day off to spend time with Jacob and Andrea. Our original intent was Parc Omega as the main plan, and we didn’t plan it very well earlier. You need to buy timed entry tickets, and by the time we realized that, the only openings were for lunch or afterwards. I would have preferred to be there earlier in the day, eat lunch afterwards or during, and then stop somewhere like Petrie Island on the way back. But no worries, we bought for 2:00 and planned to go mini-golfing in the morning after basic errands like groceries.
Except by the time we were ready for mini-golf, it looked like it was about to rain. And the forecast for the afternoon for both here and Montebello showed a high probability of showers. Would the animals be equally “out and about” if it was raining? Was it worth the trip? In the end, we rescheduled both activities and stayed home.
For the morning, we went with playing board games, namely Centrix (which we bought through a kickstarter campaign). Plus a few games of Squarrels (like “squirrels” but you are having quarrels over acorns, hence the name). Then we had a brain wave…what about Lone Star for lunch? We had been talking about it for dinner sometime soon-ish, at Jacob’s request but with no objection from Andrea or I, and we substituted in lunch. While it wasn’t “fast” for prep, it was really good, as always.
By the time we were done, it was time for a chess class for Jacob that we had expected to have to skip but he could do since our vacation day was now a staycation day. When we finished that, Andrea and I were ready to play Dice Forge, the big board game we play when we have extra time for setup and play. But Jacob wasn’t up to it, and instead wanted to play video games.
Generally, that doesn’t work well for three of us with a big split screen, and the first attempt — regular Minecraft — was a bust for screen size. But we could play Minecraft Dungeons together, and Andrea didn’t mind it. It’s a bit mindless running around stabbing and shooting things with arrows, but as a cooperative game play, it’s highly functional. It worked well, and we played together for 90 minutes or so. Jacob was happy. 🙂
In other news, while Jacob was doing his chess class, I wrote a blog entry for my big astro reading project, Astro Echoes. And it turned out okay, even with 2500 words to cover the year 1941. Some really interesting stuff, and I think the project will be really fun and enlightening as I go. I even edited it slightly and sent it off as a draft submission for our local astronomy club’s monthly newsletter.
I feel good about the variety of choices made today for family, for my blog, for fun in general.
Today I choose to take the day off to spend time with family.
My “Today I choose” chain broke today after 12 updates. My previous records were 8 days straight, and then 9. But today, I don’t feel like I was making any real “choices”. More just trying to keep my head above water, and I’m not sure I even did that.
I slept badly, again, but finally got some decent sleep around 6/7, and woke up feeling like another 12 hours would have been great. Read some stuff for work while eating my breakfast at my desk, had trouble connecting to the network, but didn’t fuss too much until I realized my morning conference call was coming up, and then I couldn’t get it to connect at all, only to find out the call was actually on the regular conference line instead of a video call. Nice going, Mr. Planner.
Good conversations at work today, but for lunch, I was running late on the work stuff and so just dashed over to Tim Horton’s for sandwiches for Jacob and I, as I was too late to get one for Andrea. And she never wants anything for snackies, so I get back, and she’s still eating her lunch so could have had a snack with us i.e. doughnut or TimBit which of course I didn’t get her one. We split mine, all good.
By late afternoon, I was feeling like yesterday’s breakfast, so ended up taking a nap. I thought I would be an hour, if that, but I actually managed to sleep and woke up feeling great at 6:00. We need groceries, and our fridge was uninspiring, so we defaulted to food at the local pub and we actually went over and ate there. A whole section of the restaurant to ourselves, it seemed. But, tbh, that’s a default script, not a choice. Sometimes it IS a choice, this one wasn’t, it was just the path of least resistance to fuel.
Back home, we played cards for awhile which was nice, but that choice is now habit and routine, not a conscious “unique” choice to celebrate. Or rather, I made that choice a long time ago.
Afterwards, I thought about blogging about my new astronomy project, I really enjoyed some stuff I was reading yesterday, but I just wasn’t feeling it. I thought I would go to bed early, but it is now after midnight, and I’m still typing and screwing around on my computer accomplishing nothing. I was just randomly surfing and reading news stuff.
I tried being semi-productive, but I can’t get my tablet to synch properly with my desktop to transfer some pictures over and this glitch of connecting to the network is really beginning to piss me off. I think I’m going to have to switch Jacob’s phone over to synching with the cloud constantly rather than manually, since his didn’t synch, and since my tablet wouldn’t synch either, I’ll likely do the same for it. But that wasn’t a choice I made tonight, it was just me pushing a decision off to a time when I have more headspace.
About the only thing I felt was a “choice” today was that I started migrating my astronomy resources from my bedroom shelves to the basement to go with all the other astro mags. I would kind of like to move a bunch more stuff out of the bedroom shelves to the basement, if only to free up the space and let me move one of two large bookshelves to the basement for added storage. I might be able to move both, which would be nice. Neither one really belongs in the bedroom, I just didn’t have good options in the office previously.
But honestly, I just moved about 20 books to the basement. That’s it. Not exactly giving me goose bumps. Seems more like simple housework than a conscious choice about how I live my life or stay in the moment.
I know some of my blah feeling is likely a result of my sinuses going haywire with the change in temps, although I thought my BP was going wonky too. Except that I have tested it twice, and it’s actually lower than normal.
I toyed with the idea today of re-kickstarting my quote collection but even though it wouldn’t have been much work either, I still wasn’t into it.
Just a blah day. But I couldn’t feel even like making a choice to feel blah was a choice. It was just the lowest common form of existence I could muster today.
Hope you made conscious choices today…my daily streak ends at 12 days.
As readers of my blog know, I am an amateur astronomer. And my road into astronomy has not been paved with the remains of rainbows or yesterday’s sunbeams. I have struggled mightily over the last 7 years, including some epic battles with my scope to get aligned.
In the end, two people in the club really helped me nail down my wayward astro gremlins, and now I try to pay it back whenever I can. I have a couple of posts that get a lot of foot traffic about the “proper” way to do alignment of a Celestron GoTo scope, and I’m of the firm belief that users of the SE series of scopes fall into very set categories:
75% of owners will use their scopes right out of the box without any trouble, it will work as intended, no gremlins;
10% will not get it to work, but it is more user error than anything else, and they will never get ANY scope to work, because it just doesn’t make sense to them;
10% will struggle mightily but will learn how to make it work; and,
5% will have serious gremlins that they won’t be able to banish, or even know what gremlins they face.
So I know that my type of scopes are popular, and I want to make sure no one is left dangling. It’s a horrible feeling. And since I have experience with it, I tried to do some training tonight for 4 intrepid souls looking for some assistance. Three made it out, betting the fourth might not of expected us to go ahead as it was looking almost like a thunderstorm was coming
One of the three has had a scope before, relatively understanding of the stars, just new to goto scopes; another was relatively new to astronomy but had set up a couple of times; and the third was brand new and had no idea how to get his scope going.
Unfortunately, both the last one I listed and me were not prepared properly for tonight. I started to set up my scope, and after a little bit of time, realized that I totally forgot my diagonal. I normally have it attached, but I did some stuff awhile ago and there was no joy in Mudville tonight. It wasn’t attached and I didn’t think to bring it, thinking the old one was still on there. Nope, removed it some time ago. Sigh. So I didn’t get very far. For the other fellow, the battery on his Red Dot Finder died. For the more experienced guy, something is off with his handset or scope, not sure which. So his worked, but not as well as it should have.
And honestly? That’s the type of thing that can drive you crazy…you think it isn’t quite right, but start to doubt yourself, so having an experienced person say, “No, you’re right, it isn’t supposed to do THAT!” is helpful, if not a solution. We’ll work on fixing that over time though.
I was surprised though about the training. I expected to run through pretty quick, and everybody would be able to replicate my steps. But it didn’t take long for that plan to fall by the wayside. One had problems with his red dot finder, another had problems understanding what he had to do, third was having equipment problems. Each of these meant stopping to help JUST that person. A fourth person would have messed that up.
Others had suggested only doing 1:1 but that seemed SO inefficient. I’m going to do some videos at some point, so this was a bit of a test, and as a test, I would say we’re going to be in beta mode for a long time. But one went away “solved”, more or less.
About two years ago, a member of our astronomy club was helping the widow of another astronomy club member who had passed away. Like many of the survivors of astro lovers, the widow inherited a bunch of astro equipment, digital remnants and a bunch of accumulated reference material. To wit, he had left behind a large collection of issues of Sky & Telescope.
For those of you who don’t immediately know (and why would you?), S&T started publication way back in 1942 and has been going strong ever since. Almost immediately, even during WW II, it moved to 12 issues per year. The late astronomer had every issue, as far as I can tell, from 1966 through to 2017. Quite the collection. And when the helper guy sent out an email asking if anyone wanted them, my initial thought was not “Hell no” but rather “What an interesting project.”
The potential bias of new-found passion
You see, I’m a latecomer to astronomy circles. While I was interested as a kid, I was 45 before I had my first real scope. As such, I am prone to that syndrome common to all late converts, the possible belief that astronomy really started the day we started observing, and that nothing that came before is worth reviewing. Get the basics, start new, and assume that everything you experience “new” is likely genuinely new.
People in religious circles experience it all the time…the newest converts are often the most passionate, assuming they know how to interpret scriptures because they can read and they know how to recruit people to their new passions too.
Many new converts to hobbies suffer the same passion bias…they want the newest book, the newest gadget, the latest technique. But I’ve been down that road in lots of different disciplines and I know that while you might toss the bath water, you make sure you save the baby first.
But here was 50 years of recent astronomy history, doled out in monthly increments. What riches are hidden in those pages? What lessons learned could I glean if I went through them, in relative order, that wouldn’t be apparent just from reading a current issue? How would I know the best way to interpret the current context if I don’t know from whence it evolved?
More pointedly, what is truly “new” and what is merely “old song and dance routines dressed up in new costumes”?
Enter the project idea
I wasn’t 100% sure what the project would be, or what form it would take, but I had some initial inklings. I took them all. No, I didn’t ask my wife, and she has politely refrained from asking me if I am completely f***ing nuts, mostly because she already knows the answer to that. She believes me to be a hoarder, and in some senses, she isn’t wrong. But that is not what this is. I have no desire to hang on to them in perpetuity, they are disposable in my view.
I want to read them, in order, but quite frankly, I know I don’t have the time. What I CAN do is skim read them, noting things that leap out at me as interesting. There will be some obvious big leaps…how do they react to the latest eclipse or comet? How did they respond to a bunch of the space era milestones of the ’60s? And when our first explorer crafts approached the other planets, how did the magazine cover it? All of those are fair game.
But that’s not really what I’m most excited about in my browsing and reading. I’m really looking for things that haven’t changed. Advice, for instance, on getting started. The importance of learning the sky. Maybe some enduring legacy approaches that are interesting to see in context. Is it a planisphere? Is it a moon map? Is it a simple version of our modern day star charts? Is it endless lists of RA and DEC coordinates?
In short, I don’t know. And I wasn’t sure if/when I would ever know. All the magazines came in boxes initially, and then I put them on a storage bookcase, mostly stacked by decade. So, for example, all the 1970s were grouped together and took up two “cubes” in the shelving. But within that decade, nothing was further sorted. It was just all jumbled together. Mostly there were 4-5 issues together that were in order, mainly from where I moved them off their original shelving in the widow’s inherited library, one handful at a time. Then again when I took them out of the boxes. But if I’m going to do this project, I really need them sorted at some point.
Since I was moving them across my basement, and moving the shelving it was all sitting on, now is the time to do a sort and get it “done”. 52 years, 12 issues per year, plus asundry other magazines here and there stuck in, probably another 75 or so…call it 700 issues in total. That is a lot of sorting. Oddly enough though, I have some experience sorting magazines. I did it A LOT back when I worked at the library during my undergrad at Trent. Normally it was alphabetical — A-F, G-M, N-S, T-Z (a 6,7,6,7 split). For this, it was simpler, group by decade first (pretty much already done) and then take a decade at a time, dropping them into years, before then sorting a single year at a time in reverse chron order. I thought it would take a lot longer than it did. I was about 40% of the way through, staring at a large number of remaining issues and thinking I should just stop at that point and dump the rest together without sorting them further.
But I stuck with it and the rest wasn’t that bad, improved partly by the layout of the magazine. For an extended period of time, they produced thicker issues with the month and year on the spine. Much easier to sort than looking for it on the cover where it moved around about 6 times over the 50 years. That would have drove us nuts in the library back in the day when we were trying to do binding because we had to fill out forms that gave details about where certain info could be found on the issues. Annoying if it moved around as it did here. Oddly enough, I found myself thinking a lot today about my time at Trent. Most of the people I worked with are all gone now, and I mean that literally. Most of the permanent staff were all at retirement age when I left 30 years ago, and the ones I was close to have all passed on. I feel a bit of a void from different parts of my life, and that is one. I guess those will increase as time goes on.
Anyway, I digress. As I said, I persevered, and they are all entirely sorted for the years that I have them at least. I can access electronic versions for the missing years, and I’m inclined to go all the way back to the beginning.
My idea, as I said, is not to read every word, there is no time for that and this isn’t an academic research paper going for an in-depth comprehensive consideration of every article. Instead, I’m looking for things that appeal to the new astronomer. Almost paper-based versions of outreach, in a sense. The electronic versions are going to be hard as they are scanned PDFs, and the quality isn’t that great for the original typeset nor the scan itself. But it’s a start.
I’m undecided how much volume my reading will produce…I’ll blog as I go, but I don’t know if I’m talking a short blog for every issue, a blog for every year, or a blog for every five to ten years. All three appeal to me, to be honest. And I’m hoping to include them as articles for our local astronomy club, although again, I don’t want them to be too long yet I also don’t want to be trying to do 10 years of articles in 500 words or something. We’ll see what I get as I go. I will likely start off with a blog for each year, but we’ll see how much that produces. At least I’m semi-organized to start now.
Today I choose to start a long-term astro project, reading all the back issues of Sky & Telescope magazine back to 1942. If I cover a year a month, it’ll take me almost seven years to clear everything out. I’m hoping to get it down to about half that, but we’ll see. Depends on how interesting I find each issue and if I get bogged down anywhere or not.
A number of weeks ago, I moved our big TV from the basement to the living room as Andrea and Jacob tend to watch TV in the living room, and the one that was there was a little small to watch when subtitles came on. Equally, for some strange reason, Jacob’s video games would not resize properly on the XBox One S to fit the screen. Not quite sure what that was about. Anyway, I moved it upstairs.
As part of the planned reorg for a bunch of things, that also meant I moved the old TV downstairs and I’m going to attach various video game systems to it…an old Playstation 1, an N64, Xbox 360, possibly a computer system running RetroArch, and if I can get it to work, the old Wii. Unfortunately, my old TV stand isn’t really conducive to that kind of setup. For one thing, it sits very low to the ground. Which was fine when the TV was bigger. Now that it’s a small one, not so handy. Equally, there wasn’t enough space underneath for the various game systems. I could likely run 2-3 okay in it, but 4-5 connections? Not so much. Plus I have to find room for a DVD player and my VMedia box.
So about 4-6 weeks ago, I went shopping online, checked out various stores in Ottawa, found a decent enough TV stand at JSYK, they had it in stock in Orleans, so I jumped some hoops, tweaked my schedule, and off I went. It was one of my first real outings with my full mask running to a “new store”. I’d been to Staples, groceries, Shoppers Drug Mart, but this was my first outing ever to a JSYK, let alone to Orleans and figuring out pickup from the back of their store.
$179.99 regularly and technically it’s a “sideboard”, not a TV stand, but the dimensions were good and enough shelving in it to handle all of the equipment. I think.
And it is has been sitting unopened in the basement ever since. I opened it on Friday, unpacked a bit of it to get a feel for the build on Saturday, and today I dug in amid a bunch of other chores for the day. Andrea helped me with the middle section of it, which was great, I really needed a second hand for those stages or I’d probably still be going.
The quality is okay, although it was missing a dowel for one connection (I used an extra one from another build project that came with extras from Amazon) and there was supposed to be a little “holder” for doing the finishing nails so you don’t risk mashing your thumbs trying to hold them, but it was missing too. No biggie for either one, I adjusted.
The unit is together, and other than the fact that I’m missing the power cable cord for the TV, it mostly works. Except remember how I said it’s technically a sideboard, not a TV stand? Welllll, that also means that there are VERY few ways for cables to go out the back. In my defence, it DID show photos of it in the pic of having a TV on it. Anyway, it likely means I’ll have to cut some little box holes in the back of the unit (it’s just simple particle board) to let the gadgets connect. But it’s together and done. On to other issues for the basement.
Today I choose to assemble a new TV stand for the basement, giving me a setup for all the gadgets to be together.
