I would have had my first class this afternoon, only the school decided to close at 2:00 because of the weather. The people who had spent all morning fighting ice and traffic to get there were fairly upset about that. It was no particular trouble for me, I just walked back home and made some tea and burnt my finger taking a pizza out of the oven ( Read more... )

Wake up, dehydrated. Take swig from bottle beside bed; swallow water, gnats. Provides protein and trace minerals. No substitute for coffee ( Read more... )

There were some good optics today, as I was walking across town. I would have liked to stop and take some pictures, but my hands were full of library books at the time, and it seemed like it would be a bad idea to try and juggle those and my camera while trying not to get hit by stray taxis. So I merely admired them and walked on ( Read more... )

It's been a bad week, but I think I am getting better. Enough that I'm typing, instead of huddling in a chair and feeling sorry for myself, at any rate.

We looked at this painting today in art history:

( Jupiter and Io )

This has been a really lousy day for health and a really excellent day for optics. I still seem to be fighting a cold, or maybe it's a different cold than the one I had last week. Whichever it is, my throat is a bit scratchy and the rest of me is all slow-moving and spaced-out. I've spent a lot of the day eating soup and jello, and drinking tea ( Read more... )

Shopping makes me more tired than I would have thought possible. I think this is the most time I've spent in a mall-like atmosphere in about a year. I've performed my annual ritual of trying on a lot of interestingly-colored garments, and ultimately buying one black sweater and some murky grey-green pants. Thus does my wardrobe maintain a ( Read more... )

I had been assigned aisle seats on both parts of my flight, but was able to successfully trade for the window in both cases. I was pleased about that. On the way up, we went through some clouds which had droplets big enough to make a true rainbow, something I've never seen from the air. We passed through that part quickly, and I didn't get any ( Read more... )

Transparent holographic film, with or without an adhesive backing, is unhappily difficult to find. Also, I wish Edmund Optics had a wish list, like Amazon does. None of the suppliers I actually want stuff from have wish lists, because they're too small/obscure/scientifically-minded. So it goes.

This morning we had a field trip to the Frye Museum to look at color in paintings. That was interesting and sometimes frustrating, since many of the paintings were hung and lit in ways that made it hard to avoid glare: it's tough to see the subtle variations of color when all that's visible is the reflection of the greenish spotlights. We got ( Read more... )

There was another rainbow this morning. I was just about to leave, when I happened to look out my window and realized that the sun had appeared and that there was a fine mist of rain falling. I grabbed my camera and went leaping up the stairs to the roof, all excited because it's pretty unusual to have both sun and rain in the morning. Usually ( Read more... )