out of the blue

If you want to watch meteors this year, check out the Perseid meteor shower tonight. It's probably going to be the best one of the year. Although the moon is rather large (83% of visible disk illuminated), it should set around 1:01 am, leaving the darkest part of the night undisturbed. The sun should rise at 5:43 am, but it will begin to (slightly) lighten the sky two hours before that. The sky should be completely dark by 10:17 (technically, that's the end of astronomical twilight, the least [or greatest] of the twilights). The darker the sky, the more meteors you'll see and the brighter they will appear. So go watch them from 1 to 4, if you have the chance. Try to get away from cities. The shower will be visible from Portland and Seattle, but not nearly as good as, say, a mountaintop in Eastern Oregon. Look towards the north-eastern sky.

I am still in Pullman, which means I can drive ten minutes and be away from nearly all light pollution. There is a completely clear sky with only a faint breeze. In other words, perfect viewing conditions. I hope you are as lucky.

Today's xkcd is excellent.

So my flickr image "Survey Marker" just received a comment:

Hi, I'm an admin for a group called USGS Geodetic Survey Markers, and we'd love to have this added to the group!

I wouldn't mind contributing to such a random group, but only members can add to the pool.

Sarah and I drove to the Snake River last night. On the drive there the sun blinded me at intervals, but I managed to stay on the road. By the time we arrived, the sun had set and the moon was perched on the lip of the valley. Sarah set up her algae collectors. Then we walked around looking for a place to watch the sky. We decided on a dock right on the river where we wouldn't have to worry about the sleeping bags getting too dusty.

When I was a kid, my family went to the Oregon Star Party nearly every year. My dad made his own eight-inch Newtonian reflector, and a few years after that we made a smaller four-inch scope for me, complete with a polished wooden tripod. Star parties play host to one of my favorite environments: late at night when everyone is huddled over their star charts with their red-cellophane-covered flashlights, or up on ladders next to the giant forty-inch reflectors hoping not to fall, or simply reclining on lawn chairs like me, falling slowly asleep with the constellations laid out above.

The best part about it is the murmur. A crowd of fifty to two-hundred people, all out there for the purpose of looking at the stars. Finding some of those more obscure galaxies and nebulae is a challenge. You have to rely on reference stars, intuition, and a hefty measure of old-fashioned searching — panning the telescope back and forth across the general area until you stumble across it. So people talk, about theory, about life, about science, about what to look for next. And they are doing it all over this tree-less mountaintop. There's a sense of community about it, an undemanding community built around simple appreciation of the universe. People gathered together to admire the majesty of the night sky.

So Sarah and I lay beneath the stars for a few hours, watching for shooting stars and talking and just being together. We watched Jupiter set and Cassiopia set, we saw Scorpio linger in the southern sky and then drop beneath the horizon. We watched Cygnus fly against the light of the Milky Way, and the Dippers (Ursa Major and Ursa Minor) swing around Polaris. We fell asleep.

When we awoke, the sky had grown lighter and the stars dimmer, although you couldn't tell that the light was coming particularly from the East. Cygnus had spun around and now flew in a different direction. The Big Dipper was nudging the sides of the Snake River Valley. The Pleiades glimmered faintly, but soon were lost to the lightening sky. Sparse herds of high clouds wandered in from the south. After eating some bread, cheese and a peach, we gathered our sleeping bags and pillows and headed back to the car. We climbed the twisting highway out of the valley and wound our way back home. The dawn gathered and threatened to break over the Palouse hills, but we reached Pullman and dropped down to Sarah's place before it happened.

We were safely asleep by the time the sun peeked through her windows.

I'm posting this as incontrovertible proof that men can be domestic, too. On Monday I cleaned the house; on Tuesday I made dinner while Sarah worked on her research proposal; today I'm making muffins while reading a book about Asian culture. Later I'll run an errand, and we'll probably have leftovers for dinner. Oh yeah.

Since I'm working on catching up, here are some photosets from my family trip around Europe (which ended, admittedly, a full month ago).

• Norwich
• Germany
• Lucerne
• Alps
• Italy
• London

Plus, a special bonus set from Sarah's and my trip to Astoria.

I've only posted twice this month so far. Shameful, I know, but I've been keeping busy. In a loose sense of the word. This is for catching up.

I wrapped up my time in Portland with a trip with my sister and Rusty to Nicholas' Restaurant downtown on the east side of the river. It's one of my favorites, a little Lebanese place that serves absolutely the best pita bread ever. Get a mezza platter, and make sure you try their mjadra.

The following day I finished up a few chores, then went far too early to Union Station to catch the 2:50 train to Tukwila. I had to walk a few miles to the Max station, since I didn't have a ride, and I misjudged it. So I got to the station around noon and read part of Annie Dillard's book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. By the time I got to Tukwila (and had to walk the last mile to Soren and Alice's apartment) I was 2/3rds of the way through, but I didn't read any more that night. Instead, Aaron came down from Bellevue to pick me up, and I spent the evening with him and Nathan.

The next morning I felt randomly sick, but the day after that was better. Which was lucky, since Sarah drove over that afternoon and we met Cami (and Aaron, and Nathan) for a crazy Seattle gathering. We walked all over and had Indian food and sat on a park bench at midnight and talked about everything. That sort of thing takes a while, so we only got about halfway through before we had to go our separate ways. Leaves something to talk about next time.

Anyway, on to the next day! It was the best day in a long time, and I've had some good ones recently. Sarah and I ate the leftover Indian food for breakfast, then drove to the Wallingford region of Seattle. We had delicious Keemun tea and a cranberry-orange scone at the Teahouse Kuan Kin. Then we walked up and down the main street in Wallingford until we felt like moving on. On our way towards the Fremont neighborhood, we drooled over the beautiful houses and trees and dreamed about living there someday. We ate dinner in Fremont at a place called Brad's Swingside Cafe, which served an intriguing mixture of dishes. They also served homemade cracker-like flatbread in their baskets, which was better than the normal bread. If you go there, make sure you split something.

That evening we visited with Alice and watched Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog before falling asleep. The following morning we packed up and left for a backpacking trip in the Cascades. We arrived at the Talapus Lake trailhead at one, and hiked all afternoon to Island Lake: 5.25 miles and 1900 feet of elevation gain. I've had worse, but I was still not in top condition due to being sick. Anyway, we ate bread, cheese and black forest ham for dinner, and had a relaxing evening in the mountains. We hiked out in the morning, and got to the car by noon, meaning we spent less than 24 hours in the woods. It felt like longer. It was refreshing. I hadn't been backpacking since Rock Lake last summer.

So we stopped a few places, and finally made it back to Pullman at 6ish that evening (I say 6ish because I predicted 6, and we pulled up to Sarah's front door a mere 20 seconds after the clock stopped saying 6:00; it was sad). After a tasty dinner at a Thai restaurant we spent the rest of the night recovering from the exhaustion that stemmed from hiking and driving so much. We slept, earlier than I've slept in a very long time.

Which brings us to today. Sarah went off to work in the morning after breakfast and blog-reading. I dried out our camping gear and stowed my stuff for the couple weeks that I'm here. I might have done a little bit of cleaning, but don't tell Sarah. She's on her way back now to work on her research proposal at home, and I assume she'll see the kitchen before she reads her blogs again.

That's how things stand. Hope you enjoyed the trip.

I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I'd half-awaken. He'd stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses.

It was hot, so hot the mirror felt warm. I washed before the mirror in a daze, my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp. What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain. I never knew. I never knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I'd purified myself or ruined the blood sign of the passover. We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence…. "Seems like we're just set down here," a woman said to me recently, "and don't nobody know why."

— Annie Dillard

I think "mahogany at midnight" would be an excellent crayon color. It is also an excellent hair color.

I'm back, after a very long day of traveling. I should see some of you quite soon.