Beaches, bonfires and butterflies

What a good weekend! Saturday we loaded up both my and Dave's trunk's full of firewood and went to the beach and had a bonfire! Look at all the wood that fits in my trunk!
It was a beautiful night, the fire burning brightly on the beach, a full moon casting its light onto the rolling waves, just a few clouds obscuring the stars. Sirius is huge now, and Orion was about halfway above the horizon. He's a winter constellation, so I won't be able to see him for much longer. Dave brought his mechanized telescope, and it gave us a tour of the skies. We got a gorgeous view of the moon and Saturn, good enough to see the rings clearly! I brought marshmallows and roasted and ate them with brownies, better than s'mores!


Sunday we went to the Songkran festival, a Thai New Year's festival at a Buddhist temple in Sugarland. We met up with some friends I used to work with, and enjoyed delicious Thai food with them and their family. One of my friend's Aunts, who is Thai, was surprised that I ate all the authentic Thai desserts. I said the key word there was "desserts" lol.

After we ate we lined up to be blessed by the monks for luck in the New Year. We filled golden bowls with water from an urn filled with water and flower petals, then poured the water over a statue of the Buddha and over the hands of monks who held their hands over flower-filled glass vases. They sprinkled us with water in turn, blessing us and wishing us health and luck in the New Year. There was a lot of running around sprinkling water on each other afterwards, it seems like a fun tradition. Then there was a cermony releasing 99 doves for world peace, harmony, and love. It was a beautiful ceremony, I wish more people could see it. Maybe if everyone could spend a sunny afternoon eating good food with their friends, being blessed, and watching doves fly, there would be a lot more peace in the world.
We also released hundreds of Monarch butterflies, to remember lost loved ones. Everyone in the audience got to hold a box with a butterfly in it, and we released them right after the doves were released. I thought about my grandfathers.
It was really a very good weekend. Exhausting, though, we came home and took a 4 hour nap. Back to work tomorrow, and homemade pasta and roasted tomato sauce for dinner tomorrow night.

I took all the pictures here on my phone, they came out pretty nice, I think. There were a lot of people taking pictures, and the whole ceremony was filmed, so I didn't worry about offending anyone there.

Bah, politics

The reason why I may be voting Republican this year, if the primary doesn't turn out well for Clinton: Obama wants me to lose my job. He's obviously timed this announcement well, most of the states with large space programs have already had their primaries, and many of the remaining states aren't doing so hot in the education department.

Some numbers provided by Ben:
States remaining to be decided in democratic primaries: Oregon, Montana, South Dakota, Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina
Discredited States: Florida, Michigan

States with NASA Centers: California, Virginia, Ohio, New York, Maryland, West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Texas, Louisiana, New Mexico

Rank of expenditures per student for states left in democratic
primaries:
Oregon: #28
Montana: #26
South Dakota: #35
Indiana: #22
Pennsylvania: #21
West Virginia: #15
Kentucky: #30
North Carolina: #41

School Teacher Salary Rank:
Oregon: #14
Montana: #46
South Dakota: #51
Indiana: #17
Pennsylvania: #10
West Virginia: #42
Kentucky: #34
North Carolina: #24

Only one of the states remaining has a NASA Center. The majority of the remaining states are in the bottom half of salary and expenditures per student.

It is very rare for NASA to compete with education for money, because they're separate issues, both of which deserve a lot more money than they ever get. But his plan would put us without human spaceflight capability for almost 10 years! Not to mention how many thousands of NASA employees and contractors will be laid off in the states that had their primaries before he came out with this plan, and it's not like there's that much commercial spaceflight going on yet to pick up the slack.

People, we will never have colonies on the moon if all of our engineers die of old age before we get around to going back, and everyone knows it won't be the future until we have moon colonies. Apparently Obama just doesn't want it to be the future. I guess we shouldn't even bother asking him for funding for flying cars or hoverboards.

Libraries

I greatly approve of the idea of libraries, in principle. Everyone should have access to a wide variety of books, and they have entire teams of people who seem to find great satisfaction in helping you find something to read. Libraries are places to collect knowledge and distribute it to anyone who asks for it. Their function seems to epitomize the concepts of freedom and equality, where anyone can read any book they choose, freely, and then pass it on to someone else, sharing knowledge.

But they have one flaw, in my eyes. They want their books back.

This is necessary for the whole "sharing" part of the sharing knowledge thing, I know, but somehow it feels like every book I read becomes a part of me, and I don't want to let that part go. I was never so happy and comfortable in my apartment as when I got more bookcases and could finally look at all of my books at the same time. This fulfills some deep-seated need inside me, for which I have no explanation. My mother and sister are perfectly happy to read a book once and release it back into the wild, never to be seen or heard from again, here one day and then gone, like the wind. (Possibly with,..)
I am perfectly happy to lend books out for extended periods of time, like foreign exchange children, sending them out to see the world, knowing they will come back one day enriched and wise from their travels, eager to share their journeys with the stay-at-home books still on the shelves. But I might want to read them again! Or lend a particular book to someone who absolutely has to read it, in my opinion. (There are a lot of books a lot of people absolutely have to read, usually starting with the last one I just finished.) Plus I feel like I've just won something when I find some old, out of print SF book I-just-realized-I've-been-looking-for-my-whole-life in a back corner of a used-book store, how could I let it go afterward? SF readers tend to be hoarders, it's not just me. I've heard from used-book store owners that the only way they get large collections of SF is when the owners die and can't complain about people giving away their books anymore.

Maybe my problem with libraries is I don't own them. Maybe I should have been a librarian. Maybe if I continue accumulating books, I can just open my own library,..

At any rate, I now have a library card for the Harris Country Public Library and have requested about 50 things from their online catalog. They actually have a very good selection of movies and TV show seasons on DVD, which are much easier to return after watching. And I finally requested Your Money or Your Life, a personal finance book I couldn't bring myself to spend money on but have been wanting to read.

So hopefully I will be able to overcome my squirrel-like hoarding instinct and Charlton Heston-like resistance-to-having-things-pried-from-my-warm-and-living-hand instinct and give them their books back when I'm done reading them.