Back!

I have returned from Germany! It was a lovely trip (with some pluses and minuses thrown in there, it still averaged out to 'lovely'), but I'm very glad to be home. Lots of stuff to come home to! Unsurprisingly, the house didn't magically fix itself while I was gone, so there's still the kitchen and bath remodeling to attend to. Last night, HTB and I picked out stuff for our reception- colors, lights, cake, all that kind of stuff. I'm volunteering for a science summer camp, so much of my day is taken by that. Add in the fact that in two weeks' time, I'll be in Scotland and I have a butt-ton gobsmacking motherload of stuff to do, and it's quite a stressful time right now. I wanted to just do a quick picture update to let everybody know I'm still alive and kicking!

Stephanie, Van and I on the island of Mainau. Yep, I knit the shrug I'm wearing :)

One of Lindau's many fountains- this one very near to the island's LYS, Inselwolle! We loitered here for a while- because in Europe, loitering is ok! Encouraged, even.

A square in the city, with beautiful fountain and outdoor restaurant seating. Their pizza- awesome.

Entrance to Lindau Harbor, with lion on left and lighthouse to the right.

Back in a week or so!

Auf wiedersehen!

Lily says, "Oh, no! Who's going to feed me now? Bunny-Dad? But he always skimps on the chow!"

Poor timing is...

...when you leave for Germany tomorrow morning and decide to stay home from work today to do laundry, only to find that the city is doing repairs on the street outside which has been gushing up water from an unknown subterranean source for the past week and to facilitate these repairs- and they just turned of the water to your condo complex.

Father-in-law

I love my father-in-law, he's awesome. He stopped by to visit us in Nashvegas tonight on his way (driving!) from Scottsdale AZ to Hartford, CT. Quite the road trip! I always enjoy his visits, he has a very engaging personality and can talk about just about anything- he tells us about economics, government, and history; we talk to him about physics, astronomy, and grad school in general. We had a very lovely evening hanging out, having dinner, chatting over beer. Lots of beer... which leaves me a bit sleepy. Maybe I'll turn in early tonight.. tomorrow's another day, after all! G'night, everyone... do something fun today, for f---'s sake, life's too short not to.

(See Crazy Aunt Purl's birthday resolution for a more eloquently put argument in this same vein.)

"I hear water..."

Harbinger of doom, this phrase is. Our house is... quirky, to put it kindly. We've only used one side of the sink -ever- because the left side has a broken disposal. Since we've been planning on redoing the kitchen (very very soon, now) we just never fixed it. So... queue the strife- the dishwasher is hooked up to the disposal, and the pressure drives water up the disposal into the sink as it drains from the dishwasher. So, HTB is taking Gracie out for a walk, and he stops in his tracks... "Water," he says, "I hear water..." and I run for the kitchen to find a waterfall flowing forth from the sink.. it ran leftward across the counter, which is slanted because the floor is uneven, and was cascading to the floor between the cabinets and our brand new oven. I pulled all our towels out of the laundry room, pulled the stove out, and put towels down to sop up the mess. We bailed out the sink and stopped the dishwasher and proceeded to survey the damage. Fortunately, we don't care about our cabinets or floor, since we're replacing them anyway.. but apparently my Thai and Italian cookbooks were ruined :( Balls! They were $5 bargain books, but still.. I love Thai food, and I've made a lot of stuff out of there.

But.. since I used our bath towels to wipe up water from under the stove.. goodness only knows what was under there (well, goodness and me, I know what was under there.. it was unpleasant, to say the least) I refused to put those into our new washing machine, and so... we got new bath towels today! Heeeeeeee :) BB&B had some clearance sets of 2 bath towels, 2 washcloths, and 2 hand towels for 10$, so we got 4 sets in awesome colors that match our bedroom color scheme (white, brown, and light blue.. plus a little green as an accent). It's been years since I had new bath towels- the ones I brought with me to grad school were some seriously old towels, I'd put them at about... hmm, 7 years? I seem to recall using them when I was in high school, and they weren't new even then. So, woo hoo! Bully for us and stimulating the economy. Yeah, right.

I need to get some work done yet tonight, but this has been a most wonderful, relaxing weekend, filled with quality time spent with HTB. Just what I needed to recharge and be ready to get back to work tomorrow. :)

Bad day/Good day

For whatever reason, something possessed me to stay up until 3am knitting on my first "Bunny pi" (Kitty pi, only for my long-eared cohort). Of course, of all nights, this was the first night I had a health scare with Gracie.

At 5:30 am, I awoke to her stomach loudly gurgling. I'm not exactly a light sleeper, this was pretty darn loud. I got up and googled and googled to my heart's content, but the internet is a dangerous place for information regarding potential emergency pet care situations. I saw lots of sites claiming that gurgling was a sure sign of GVD, some kind of gastric torsion where the stomach effectively does a backflip and cuts things off. Then I'd get to the fine print, where it would say "For dogs 75+ lbs"... so, not Gracie.. and then her stomach would churn, and I'd renew my anxious google searching with some slightly different keywords. In the situation, I did the best I knew to do- in bunnies, gastrointestinal stasis is a rapid killer. If gas builds up or they aren't moving things through their systems quickly enough, it's a matter of hours before they can go into shock and die. It's well known throughout bunny communities that if you hear them having stomach gurgling (gas moving around), you should give them an infant anti-gas medicine containing simethicone. Something else I've found to be highly effective when Ty writhes his rump in that telltale way ("Ugggh, Mom, this hurts!" he says with his body language) is to basically chase him around, get his gut moving by simple virtue of making him move.

So, around 6:30 I took Gracie for a walk, and then gave her some baby anti gas medicine and called the vet's as soon as they opened at 7:30. While I was waiting to hear back from the vet, I fell asleep.. and woke up at 11. They close at noon on Saturdays. Not hearing any more grumbling, I took her for another walk, just to monitor her behavior. She didn't act like she was in pain, her behavior was pretty normal, actually. Until the limpy-paw incident. On the way back into the house, she stopped abruptly, raised up her right paw and started twitching it around, then licked it furiously, looked for a place to sit down and continue licking it- that was the last straw. Gas and apparent paw injury- she was going to the vet, period.

In talking with the vet, our basic conclusion is that her recent crate-wars have done her no favors. She figured out how to lift the latch and free herself from her crate, so now it's a major irritation for her to be put in there. HTB and I put a padlock on the crate so she couldn't lift the latch- and she squeezed through the bottom corner of the door. We put zip ties on the crate, and for two days that worked, and then on Friday she escaped two separate times I had crated her. I'm guessing the exertion of the fight made her come downstairs Friday evening and gulp up a lot of water (plus air..) thereby causing her gassy tummy this morning, and then she probably hurt her paw (which indeed had a little red mark/scab behind one of the pads, hence why she was limping and favoring it) to boot. Maybe I'll figure out how to make a padded crate- that's where the crazy puppies must go. Just a little more time, that's all I need to get the bunnies upstairs and in a room with a door that shuts- then I'd be a lot more comfortable with not crating Gracie during the day.

That was the bad part of the day.. I think the rest of the day was pretty good. I didn't do much.. made up for all the lost sleep by napping until about 5pm :P Shameful, but hey- apparently I needed it. Of course, it means I'm still up now.. ~1:30 the next morning.. ah well, I'll go to bed soon- nothing like beverage-sleep regulation: take a shot to knock yourself out at night, and have coffee in the morning to wake yourself up. After the super nap, I just sat.. and knitted. Caught up on lots of CSI episodes, played some piano, spent time with the furballs. That was the good part of the day :) I'm sorry I missed wwkip day, but I feel so much better knowing Gracie's ok. Besides, every day is wwkip day as far as I'm concerned ;)

Tomorrow will be super fun, guaranteed- I'm shopping with a friend for my dress for me and HTB's civil ceremony :D Yeah, I know- it's totally diva of me to want two dresses, but hey... I'm not being bridezilla or anything. I had this awful dream this morning/afternoon that the day of the reception came, and I had totally forgotten to make an order with the florist or bring my table centerpieces >:| ack! I was all stressed when I woke up, and it took a while to get myself to realize I still have plenty of time.

Common questions and misconceptions, part I

I helped out at an event at the University-affiliated observatory last night, and noted a somewhat common theme of questions asked and misconceptions. I wanted to jot a few down here- in all likelihood, when one person has a question, someone else has the same question!

1. What is Pluto?

Pluto is a so-called "Dwarf Planet". In all technicality... it's still a planet, the word is still in the name, no? Pluto was hard to put into a bin for many reasons- for the very absolute simplest point, we lack formal definition of a "planet". If you went via common characteristics of all the objects we presently refer to as "planets", however, Pluto does not fit the mold. Most importantly, in my mind, its orbit is highly eccentric. The first 8 massive bodies from the Sun lie roughly in the same plane (from which they were ostensibly formed when the Sun was a wee 'un) and they have similarly near circular orbits. Composition wise, the terrestrial planets are made mostly of rock and lie close to the Sun, the gas giants are farther out but do maintain small, rocky cores under dense, extensive gaseous atmospheres. And then there's Pluto. Extremely small by comparison to any of the other planets, Pluto is made of rock, ice, and .. dirt- a lot like a dirty snowball. Its orbit is highly inclined out of the plane in which the other 8 bodies orbit, and it is very, very far away. Pluto's existence was predicted using basic physics- there are specific distances from the Sun at which resonances exist and stable orbits are possible, and we found planets (or the asteroid belt) in each of those stable orbits. As it turned out, Pluto was not alone out there- he is King of the Kuiper Belt, a host of potentially tens of thousands to millions of dirty snowball friends, potentially the debris of a planet which failed to form at that distance.

I think I just made a pretty strong argument against Pluto's planethood. But... Pluto is the only planet discovered by an American. Let's get back to this issue of defining a "planet"- here come the politics, and what was a highly unflattering time for Astronomers. At a meeting in 2006, the International Astronomical Union attempted to clearly define the word, "Planet". This is not the first time- it has been attempted by various committees in the past, only to not meet success. It's a slippery slope! Here is what the IAU voted to adopt, and why I believe it's bunk:

RESOLUTION 5A
The IAU therefore resolves that planets and other bodies in our Solar System, except satellites, be defined into three distinct categories in the following way:

(1) A "planet" [i] is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.

(2) A "dwarf planet" is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape [ii], (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.

(3) All other objects [iii], except satellites, orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as "Small Solar System Bodies".

i. The eight planets are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
ii. An IAU process will be established to assign borderline objects into either dwarf planet and other categories.
iii. These currently include most of the Solar System asteroids, most Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), comets, and other small bodies.

IAU Resolution: Pluto

The IAU further resolves: Pluto is a "dwarf planet" by the above definition and is recognized as the prototype of a new category of trans-Neptunian objects. This category is to be called "plutonian objects."

Garbage. From the top:

The IAU therefore resolves that planets and other bodies in our Solar System, except satellites, be defined into three distinct categories in the following way:

There's a large hole left by this statement. What about exoplanets, planets around other stars? This definition entirely excludes them. A totally pedantic argument here- "except satellites"- technically, planets are solar satellites. I believe they mean to exclude moons in this definition, and in a game in which clarity is critical, this is a minor but particularly irritating gaffe.

(1) A "planet" [i] is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.

Ok, so we're saying here that there should be a mass limit. Ok, I'm alright with that. The Moon is round, and in orbit around the Sun, so is it a planet? Not if you take 'satellite' from the preface to mean a body orbiting another body-that's-not-the-Sun. The first two red marked segments are only mildly heinous in comparison to the final, completely egregious statement- clearing the neighborhood around your orbit means nothing is in the same orbit as you. This means that Earth is not a planet, Jupiter is not a planet, and neither are Mars, Saturn, Neptune, or Uranus- some of this is pliable because if you got super pedantic, you could say their moon/ ring material doesn't really count because they're either satellites of the planets or they aren't exactly in the same orbit. Which is true, they're not- they're really damn close, especially in astronomical terms. But in the case of Jupiter, the trojan asteroids are at the same distance as Jupiter and orbit in the same manner- they're kinda stuck (I think 30 degrees? 60 degrees? symmetrically anyway) in front of and behind Jupiter by the gravitational potential of our solar system as a whole. The neighborhood certainly isn't cleared there. So, sorry Jupiter- it was nice knowing you. The rest of the aforementioned get off on a technicality for now. The second point:

(2) A "dwarf planet" is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape [ii], (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.

Cute. This is so obviously tailored to fit Pluto it's crazy. But if you use similar logic as above, its orbit isn't cleared. That pesky Charon is spoiling it for Pluto, too.

"Planet" count, as really defined by the IAU: 2

If you're still awake and interested in reading more, here's a good recent article that sums up the issue, gives some more recent results, and discusses NASA's mission to Pluto, "New Horizons" :
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/06/13/1140398.aspx

Next time- the Sun!