Mike was doing the Saturday Night LAN, what with the half-a-planet-away situation, so by 9 a.m. I was on the road to Austin to check out a scope shop I'd found via the Celestron site. See? Web advertising works. That, and sometimes the patience of small city life doesn't extend to waiting for the UPS man. I want my nebulae and I want it now.
Plus, it was a great opportunity to stretch the new car's wings. Plus, I could put off a proposal I have to write where I have yet to get past the headings without falling into despair over how pompous I sound. Plus, I could experience a happy medium of travel between Wal-Mart and Walt Disney World.
By the by, later today, I'll launch an astronomy blog. It may not be regularly maintained, but it will be there whenever it's needed. I hesitate to give it its own blog and thus rip potentially interesting subject matter away from this main dairy, but down the road it's always more fun to concatenate than to extract.
Until then, I present a little photo essay of the past 24 hours:
ja, it's all clickable
Here's how it started. Mom and Dad received a notice from UPS in the mail that there wasn't enough address on a package for it to be delivered. (Apparently UPS trusts the post office to do a better job with partial addresses.) Hoping it might be the telescope, I went to pick it up. In the course of my patter to the UPS clerk, I discovered that it was the bikes that arrived, so we scheduled a re-delivery. But before I could leave, he had me sign for this box. Despite the return address of Brainsomethingorother Logisticsomething, I made no assumptions and put it in the trunk. I took it to M&D's, just in case it was the decanter or something. As I lifted it from the trunk, I saw C E L E S T R O N printed on the side. Ah! And home we went, to clap and play.
Ah, so beautiful! So elegant! So celestial! Isn't that Coruscant on the box?
Swedish Pump Telescopes Really are My Bag, Baby.
I had to edit this and a couple of the following photographs because of the friendly foot fetishest who keeps writing in. After years of deliberately sticking my foot into photos, I seem to be doing it without thinking now. He seems to be a nice guy, so I'm sure he'll understand when I say that my feet prefer to remain modestly out of frame. Keep a little mystique going, and all that. Hence the small, odd squares of carpet, here and there.
Meanwhile, doesn't the scope look like a rocket on the launching pad? How themey. The handle looks a little frightening, but remember that the hand controller pulls out and is relatively slim.
I think I had exactly 8 AA batteries on hand without having to raid the camera or the remotes. Two rechargeables, and the rest cheap no-names that I was keeping with little hope for an occasion. Ha! Later, over at the units, we used a 12v adapter and an industrial orange extension cord suitable for sanding warehouse floors. Back at home afterwards, I thought maybe the weak batteries were interfering with slewing for alignment. (It was my fault, actually.) I ran out and bought some disposable AAs from Walgreens. Later I'll get more rechargeables. Wal-Mart was just too far. See, Austin wasn't even a peppercorn in the noodle at this time.
A word: getting the battery cover off was a chore. Hence the paper-clips. Dad got it off in seconds. I still think it's the scope. Which brings us to...
This was my view after an hour of trying to remove the hand controller from the base. Dad called about this time and suggested I bring it over for him to try. I did, and he did, and he got it off in a flash. Then he put it back and struggled for a few minutes, but managed to do it again. I haven't tried since. I'm not quite ready. As Dad later put it to Mom, "I called her up and the telescope was kicking her ass.”
A closer view of the keypad. Check out the cool, intuitive buttons. Press PLANETS and you just pick a planet to begin the slew.
Circa 14 hours later, a pumpkin+ stand in Luling as I refuel the car. (And begin to discover its reassuring highway mileage.) I wanted to refuel in Gonzales, but I couldn't pay at the pump. I'd also like to point out that Exxon billboards saying "right 1/2 mile" could mean both "turn right" and "on the right.” Well, they could. I'm a little weirded out: I thought there was a town called Columbus between Victoria and Austin? What happened to it?
I don't know if I would have gone if I'd remembered that Anderson Mill Road is not just on the north side of the city (and I was coming in from the south), but about as far west as you can go without skeptical looks at the city limits (and I was coming in from the east). The man-in-charge at Austin Astronomy was knowledgeable, friendly, and clearly interested in not only making people happy, but doing what he could to help them get the most from their hobby. It's impressive, finding such wealth in people and product in one small, strip-mall shop.
In the very attractive little sack my new Barlow, 6mm starts-with-an-L-the-one-with-great-eye-relief lens, and rubber lens sombrero lie sleeping.
I snapped this while at the long left turn light at the bottom of the fun hill connecting Guadalupe and Lamar. I don't think this was whatever it now is when I lived in Austin. I told Mike I didn't know what it was. He said, "It's the Eiffel Tower.”
I couldn't leave Austin without some fresh Rosa's salsa verde and Rosarita's black bean tamales. Although it was weird to find that despite having far more disposable income than seven years ago, Whole Foods is still prohibitively pricey is many ways. In fact, perhaps more so. Did they jack up the numbers when they left their more humble venues?
Still, it was great inside. I'd forgotten that distinctive smell when you first walk in. What is it? There were so many things I would have liked to pick up, but I only saw handbaskets, plus I didn't have a cooler. Plus, much of it would have been just for fun. The tamales weren't there, alas. I remember WF used to sell a big sack of them for $2.50 to $3 or so. Instead, they had Molly Somebody's Tamales at $6 for a handful. These also looked delicious, but again, the refrigeration issue.
I did get the salsa verde. Three jars in the fridge as I speak. We must consume them all by October. Please set your meal planning software accordingly.
And then there's BookPeople, another "I knew them when.” I also knew them in their current location. Today I'm an Amazon gal, so what can I say? I didn't go in. Bookstores on Saturdays are for the young.
It took some scouting at WF to find a tasty lunch that could be eaten at stoplights and cost less than $5. The sandwich, four cheese and chipotle mayonnaise, was absolutely delicious. (I really wanted the hummus sandwich, to be honest, but it was $5 and little more than two pieces of bread with the hummus and a bit of lettuce.) That tea, however, was bitter and bland. Lemon? Lightly sweetened? Only if you're the Emperor's personal shopper.
It's not the first time a website of mine has been on a billboard (all webworkers in Victoria can probably reminisce those lines), but it's the first time I've ever seen one of mine outside of the Victoria area, let alone as one begins to enter the state capital. There's a swingin' town I known called... Capital City. People stop and scream hello in... Capital City. It's the kind of place that makes a bum feel like a king. And it makes a king feel like some nutty, cuckoo, super-king... (The Simpsons, "Dancin' Homer.”)
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