Can’t sleep…astronauts will eat me…
I should be in bed right now, catching up on all the sleep I’ve been missing over the last few days. I should be dreaming all the dreams I haven’t been dreaming, and I should have gone to bed two hours ago when I was moderately sleepy, instead of staying up and catching up on the crack TV I’ve been TiVo-ing for the last week or so.
But I’m not. I can’t sleep, so I figured I’d come onto the computer and blog, mostly because I know I haven’t been blogging for a while, which Neenyd reminded me on Saturday. Has it really been a month? Sheesh.
Cat update: Itchy’s still no better, although he’s off the ear medication. We now lovingly call him the “sideways” cat, since he constantly tilts his head to the right. He’s been managing with his disability so well that we let him outside, but he can’t get up and down the stairs by himself, so we (read: I) have to pick him up and carry him in and out of the house. He enjoys being outside, though, and I figure as long as the weather’s nice, it’s not so bad. I’m going to make another appointment with the vet, though, just in case there is something else they can do to make him “normal” again.
In the news: Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor is the first Malaysian to go into space. When I heard the story on BBC World News this morning, I actually thought he was also the first Muslim in space, but apparently I was wrong about that. He is, however, the first Muslim to be observing Ramadan in space, and he actually got the Islamic National Fatwa Council to write up a whole handbook on how to pray, fast, and otherwise observe Ramadan properly in space.
This is just another reason why I don’t like organized religion: they spend all this time and energy working out the correct way to pray instead of actually manifesting those prayers into something tangible, like helping the poor or working on peace in the Middle East or doing something about the atrocities in Darfur.
Argh. Okay, back to bed again…maybe I’ll try counting sheep.
Filed under Blogging, Cranky, Religion, cats, space | Comment (0)Outer Space
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronomer. My dad got me a telescope for my ninth birthday, and I looked through it every night at the moon. I had a big map of the moon and tried to memorize where all the various seas were. I was constantly amazed at the fact that I would have to continually adjust the telescope to follow the moon through the night sky.
I also subscribed to the 3-2-1 Contact magazine and had a huge NASA poster above my bed. My dad took me to the planetarium frequently, and I dreamt of going to space camp and working on the next space shuttle launch. I was obsessed with all the different constellations, and even without the aid of my telescope I would try to find as many recognizable stars in the night sky as I could.
Then, of course, I realized how much math went into astronomy, and the dream faded away (those of you who have ever seen me try to do math in my head know what I’m talking about).
But I’ve never stopped following the stories about the different space shuttles and keeping up on what NASA is up to these days. So when I read about the fact that the Cassini probe detected geysers of potential liquid water on one of Saturn’s moons, I felt a stab of regret that I couldn’t
become that astronomer. Maybe I would have been in the office that received those first pictures. Maybe I would have been in the meeting where they realized this may be a key to finding out about possible extraterrestrial life. Wouldn’t that have been cool?