When possible we celebrate Halloween by bringing out the telescopes and binoculars and throwing a star party on the front sidewalk while handing out candy. It has on occasion been spectacular.
After a year or two in which there wasn’t a lot of easy stuff to see from the bright, light polluted city, tonight was going to be great! The quarter moon was high and a trivially easy target. Saturn was up in the west and by the time it set Jupiter would be up in the east. Easy peasy.
Not tonight. The weather gods hate us.
Did anyone see the World Series Game Six from Dodger Stadium, which is about twenty miles from here as the crow flies? Drizzle, clouds, occasional light rain? Most of the actual rain missed us, but the clouds had us totally socked in.
The neighborhood knows us and we got asked all night about the telescopes. Sorry, I don’t have a radio telescope. If we have to stick to the optical wavelengths, tonight it was nothing but listening to the Dodgers game and handing out candy.
Also, in an hour NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) starts. As much as I enjoyed participating in past years (just search this site for “NaNoWriMo”), just as I was forced to admit last year, there’s no way this year that I have the time to even think about participating.
Not surprisingly to me, having participated in both activities, NaNoWriMo reminds me a LOT of running a marathon. Just as I am melencholy watching the LA Marathon every year when I’m not running (which is most of them these days – I ran in 2011 and 2012, trained but didn’t fun in 2013 and 2014) I will no doubt be wishing that I was writing every day in November. The reality of my schedule and multiple other commitments is little consolation.
As noted previously, being a responsilbe adult can suck.
