Talk Without Speaking

This is it - my final night shift. Ahh, I can soon go back to the land of the living. Man, time sure flies when you are so sleep deprived that your brain stops registering the passage of time in sane ways.

Although I jest, it wasn’t too bad. I actually ended up being more productive I think, during the night, that I am during the day (although my working efficiency *does* wane post 4:30am or so) because there are fewer distractions. I really enjoyed having my afternoons free to wander around during the hustle and bustle of my little neighborhood’s business hours.

My brain has really been asleep these last few days and physically I’m starting to fall apart; I really need some sleep. This, in part, explains why I really haven’t been posting for the last few days.

We did end up taking off to Tofino last weekend and had a total blast. Snapped like crazy and you can find some pictures here although I still have a bunch to upload.

Last night Ryan called me at about 11pm to let me know that the Astronomy department here at UBC was letting people use their telescopes to take a look at Mars which is at its closest point to Earth in the last 60,000 years (although it will be back this close again in a mere 280 years). Either way, I figured I should grab my chance so I wandered over there and was amazed to find several hundred people in line. Apparently they had advertised this in the Vancouver Sun and so people came out in throngs. Thankfully, Ryan was close to the front and so we got in to see it without too much of a wait.

With so much sun reflecting off of it the planet looks almost universally white, not red. With UBC’s telescopes you can tell that it’s a disk but not too much more than that. I could make out the polar caps (which, I learned, are actually not ice but rather frozen carbon dioxide) only barely. Apparently it’s better to be at a telescope that is closer to the equator which puts Mars higher in the sky therefore providing you with a shot at it which slices through less of the Earth’s atmosphere (which distorts your viewing image)

In any event, it was a lot of fun although nowhere near as gorgeous as the moon under the power of Ryan’s telescope. If you’re interested in checking it out, the UBC Astronomy dept has open observatories every Sat night and Mars isn’t going anywhere terribly fast. It will still be ‘close’ for the next month at least.

There ya have it - you’re up to date. Oh, except for the fact that I will likely not get my iPod for a couple of weeks (man, I suck at being patient). I’ve been busy consolidating my mp3 collection in preparation.