7 Things [3]

7 Things from the week, or not. Maybe just 7 things in a randomly connected order that makes sense only to me and my methods of lateral thinking.

I finally got around to looking up the huge star I’ve seen early evening for the last couple of weeks. I have a nifty difty star gazing computer program (it seriously is pretty sweet: it shows the sky realtime and you can click on the constellations to get the story behind them etc) to aid in these endeavors. Turns out the star is a planet: Venus. On the computer program, it shows up way larger than the moon, which strikes me as odd as everything else is fairly to scale. Clearly, as you can see in this picture, the moon (top) is much larger than Venus (bottom).
I started to get much more serious about figuring out the stars while on Offshore. There was one leg where we had a 2 week passage with clear skies nearly the entire way. It was in the tropics so it was warm enough that we could sit up on deck late into the night and look at the stars with a headlamp and star book in one hand and a sweet green laser pointer in the other. The Southern Hemisphere constellations seem much easier to find than the Northern ones: Scorpius, Sagittarius, Corona Australis, the Southern Cross. The Milky Way is much more visible as well, and we had a huge Jupiter and Saturn for most of the crossing. It was weird not to see Orion (or see him upside-down when we did see him) or the Big Dipper for so long though. We even did some celestial navigation (like with a sextant and all) down in French Polynesia using the stars instead of the sun.
This has been a long week and next week is going to feel even longer. Somehow, without me even really realizing it, my weekend managed to fill up completely. Like solid full. I may even be double/triple booked in a couple places. I have no idea how and when all of that happened.
The strange thing about having no classes on Monday and not always working on Monday is that my Tuesday feels like Monday. Then I get to Friday and wonder where my week went and how the weekend got here so fast. This is not contradictory with #3.
I’ve started playing the guitar at church again. It is a different experience to do it not as lead instrument but as an accompaniment. Plus, the choir pretty much drowns me out, so I’ll have to figure out something to amplify myself (aside from the obvious of plugging the guitar in, I’d like to avoid that for the time being). It is good to have some motivation to pull it out on a fairly regular basis and my callouses are finally forming up again.
I can’t wait until Reading Break. I am going to sleep all day for one day during the break. It will be heavenly.
Re #6, I fell asleep at 8:30 last night then woke up at 11:30 ready to go for the day. Then I had to try and convince my body to fall back asleep. I don’t think I should ever have a career where trying to convince people of things using my own logic is a priority.