Tag: space

D’s Notes

October 22, 2024 / DB

A few other notes from last week/the weekend plus life in general.

Health

I’ve had a couple longer spells of irregular heart beats lately, so the week before we went to Denver I wore an event monitor again. Just like the first two times I wore one, I had zero issues, so it wasn’t really helpful. Plus it made it hard for me to sleep since I’m a stomach sleeper. And you’re not supposed to get it wet so I couldn’t work out very hard or take full showers. And it itches.

There are way worse heart issues than what I’ve got, but I think this is all pretty dumb since it is so random and never fires off when the docs are keeping an eye on me.

Football

A mostly good weekend for my teams, although I wasn’t able to follow any of the games very closely.

Friday #5 Cathedral dropped their regular season finale to #6 Warren Central by 8. Sounds like it was a good game, with CHS jumping out 14–0 then the teams trading the lead in the second half. A 5–3 regular season for the Irish. Class 6A gets a bye week before starting sectionals next week. CHS will play across the street vs 0–9 North Central, then most likely play the new #1 team, 9–0 Lawrence North.

KU finally got their shit back together, although Houston being really bad helped. Every time I checked the score while we were walking around Boulder KU was either scoring or Houston was turning the ball over. Seems like the Jayhawks played well, most importantly Jalon Daniels, who had his best statistical game in two years.

Just in time, as KU has K-State, Iowa State, and BYU the next three weeks, the top three teams in the Big 12. What better moment to flip the script on this season?

The Colts won an ugly game against a banged up Dolphins team. We were home for part of this, although I wasn’t paying much attention as we got settled and unpacked. This team just isn’t that fun to watch at the moment.

WNBA Finals

I barely watched the WNBA playoffs after the Fever were eliminated, only checking in on games for a few moments here-and-there. Which is partially on me, partially on the league for agreeing to a TV schedule that often had its games going up against the NFL. Not super smart.

I did turn on the fourth quarter of game five of the Finals Sunday night. What a shit show! I was somewhat amazed at how bad the officiating was while watching the Fever this year. Each game had objectivey terrible calls, and replay reviews that sometimes had indefensible conclusions.

It was no surprise to me that the championship may have come down to an absolutely atrocious call in which the refs bailed out Breanna Stewart and then somehow upheld the defensive foul after Minnesota challenged it. Stewart hit two free throws, Minnesota missed a wide open 3 to win, and then New York won in overtime. The refs also failed to call a clear foul against New York that cost Minnesota a basket and should have put the Lynx on the line late in regulation.

I’m not saying the game was rigged because that’s dumb. But I understand all the anger flowing from Minnesota after the game. Anyone who has watched the WNBA all season was not surprised that the biggest game of the year featured calls this bad. The quality of officiating is going to be a major growing pain for a league that has more eyes on it than ever.

World Series

Oh goody, Yankees-Dodgers. There’s a lot of star power in the series, for sure. But I haven’t watched much of the playoffs since the Royals went out. I doubt I’ll spend a lot of time with this series. It is kind of crazy it’s been 33 years since these franchises last matched up in the fall classic.

Wildlife Fun

Monday morning as I walked to the gym I noticed what seemed to be a couple big piles of garbage in our yard near the busy street we sit on. This isn’t unusual. Fools are always throwing garbage from their cars. We get tons of fast food bags, beer cans and bottles, plus other random stuff. I made a mental note to grab it after my workout.

An hour later I was walking towards said piles when I realized I should have investigated closer to get out of the morning sun glare. One pile was part of the front corner of a car, including the headlight. Ten feet away was a dead deer.

Yikes.

How the fuck do I get rid of a deer?

Fortunately the city of Indianapolis has an app where you can make service requests. I wear it out in the winter reporting potholes. For the most part it seems to work, although it can take them a while to work through my list in the worst of the winter.

After enough digging I found a section where you can report dead animals. Deer was even included in the dropdown box where you identify the carcass. Midwest, baby!

I put in a request and hoped they would get to it sooner than they do potholes.

I left the house to run some errands this morning and when I returned our dead deer was gone. My tax dollars at work! I guess it could have been some hillbilly who saw a way to fill his freezer for the winter, but I’ll give the city credit.

C said she had heard an impact around 1:00 AM Monday morning and by the time she looked out her window the car had left and it was too dark to see the poor deer. Hopefully it went quick.

Comet

I might have missed the full northern lights a couple weeks ago, but I did not miss the chance to see Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, the brightest comet we’ve had since 1997.

Tuesday I drove about 10 minutes north to a park where there are no lights and a clear view to the southwest. I was able to see the comet as a bright spot and smudge with the naked eye. A three-second exposure with my iPhone got a much better view.

Still not nearly as bright as Hale-Bopp was – one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen with it’s bright tail streaking across a good chunk of the sky that summer – but I’m still glad I got to see it.

Weekend Notes

October 14, 2024 / DB

Kind of a quiet weekend for us on the personal tip. Plenty of other shit to review on this gloomy, chilly Monday morning.

Northern Lights

Since we live inside the city’s light dome, we weren’t able to just walk out and see Thursday’s northern lights. I was able to get a couple shots, using a long exposure, that showed a bit of the colors.

There were tons of amazing pictures from not too far from us. It definitely would have been worth my time to get off my ass and drive 30 minutes or so to get a bette naked eye view of them. But did I? Nope, despite seeing northern lights being on my bucket list.

Interesting Times At School

CHS parents got this text last Tuesday afternoon.

Screenshot

When the girls got home their eyes were big and they were talking fast. Apparently they were nearly in the midst of all the fun.

C said as they exited campus and headed west, they saw a car that had been pulled over by the police take off through the intersection she had just passed through to the east. Moments later they heard a bunch of loud noises as that car collided with several others that had just come off of campus. That proved these fools weren’t super criminals. Traffic around CHS during dismissal is a true nightmare. It can take you 15 minutes to travel a quarter mile if you hit the lights wrong. Yet these geniuses decided they were going to use that moment to evade cops.

A few of girls’ friends who were behind them got videos of first the car taking off, then the driver and his passenger sitting on the curb in handcuffs.

Word was they were arrested on drug and weapons charges. Awesome.

Two years ago M and C missed driving through an intersection by St P’s where there was a road-rage shooting by about five minutes. Now C and L missed get smacked by a criminal by literal seconds. They’ve obviously been saying their prayers, and/or their dead grandmas are looking out for them.

Royals

Well, it wasn’t unexpected, but after snatching game two in New York, the Royals couldn’t win either of the games at home and lost to the Yankees in four games. Another one-run loss and a two-run loss to end the season. It was pretty much all that was great about the Royals this year – the starting pitching with the bonus of an improved bullpen – and all that was not right – a woefully thin lineup that struggled to score to begin with, but had an even mightier challenge when Bobby Witt Jr. and Salvador Perez weren’t hitting.

The Yankees didn’t blow them out and the Royals didn’t embarrass themselves. Playoff baseball, especially the first two rounds, can be super flukey. That benefited the Royals in 2014. Their special blend of Royals Devil Magic did not make an appearance in this series.

Still, a surprisingly fun season. They got me at least partially interested in baseball after falling out of love with the sport because of how management handled the most recent labor stoppage.

It is probably too much to ask for the starters to be as good in 2025 as they were this year. The bullpen was bolstered late in the season and became a weapon, so pitching in general should continue to be a strength for the team. Now if management can go find a bat or two to plug the many holes in the lineup, we could be cooking with gas next year.

That said, surprisingly, the AL Central could be one of the most competitive in baseball next year. Cleveland is in the ALCS. Detroit had an amazing run late in the season and pushed Cleveland to the bring in the ALDS. The Twins fell apart late but entered the season as preseason favorites. In other words, even if the Royals make smart decisions to improve their roster for next year, there’s no guarantee it will be enough to return them to the playoffs.

KU

Hey, no Jayhawks loss this week! You never know, KU could always find a way to lose in a bye week.

It’s been kind of crazy to see how the teams that have beaten KU have done after knocking off the Jayhawks. Illinois is 5–1 and ranked. UNLV is also 5–1 despite their quarterback checking out. A week after beating KU, West Virginia went to Oklahoma State and destroyed the Cowboys before losing to Iowa State this week. Then Arizona State pulled a massive upset beating Utah this weekend. Only TCU has looked worse after beating the Jayhawks.

Mostly that doesn’t mean shit. Anyone who has watched KU this year has seen how flawed they are, both on the field and from a schematic/coaching perspective. Still, four of their losses have been by a single score. The TCU game was a single-score game until the closing minutes. As many issues as the Jayhawks have had, a few breaks here and there and they could easily be 5–1. While I think us KU fans would be waiting for reality to set in, we would feel a lot better about things.

This week brings Houston, and KU opens as favorites. Get a win and it doesn’t necessarily turn the season around, but it could at least change the vibes. Lose this one? Man, things will get ugly.

In totally unrelated news, Purdue fired their offensive coordinator last week. This week they went to Illinois. The ESPN boxscore was all messed up, but I believe they trailed by 27 in the second half before scoring 30 straight points to take the lead. They gave up a tying field goal at the final gun, then failed to convert a 2-point conversion and lost by one in OT. All from firing their OC. Hmmm….

CHS

Friday night Cathedral took on Southside Catholic rivals Roncalli. This was once one of the best rivalries in the city. Before the tournament success factor was introduced, the teams played in the same class and were often either in the same sectional or regional. In our first few years living here, they always face each other in the playoffs, and the score was usually something like 10–9 or 14–13. And Roncalli often won.

But Roncalli, aside from a 4A state title two years ago, has been kind of crappy since their legendary coach retired a while back. CHS beat them 42–0 last year. This year it wasn’t much better, a 35–6 Irish win. A CHS receiver made an insane catch for an 84-yard TD. He dropped two other sure touchdowns on easy balls. The only RHS points came on their final drive with a running clock and facing the CHS reserves.

The #5 Irish are now 5–2 with a big matchup at 7–1 #6 Warren Central to close out the regular season.

The sectional draw was last night. CHS gets the school across the street from us, who will be 0–9, to open. Then a likely matchup against presumptive 9–0 Lawrence North for the sectional crown. CHS has ended LN’s season the past two years.

Halloween Shit

Both the girls had friends over Saturday to carve pumpkins, eat fall foods, and have fun. Tough to get a shot of all the pumpkins but they look nice on our front porch.

Worth mentioning that L had a young man over she’s been hanging with for the past few weeks. He’s a nice kid. They were joined by another couple. Those four stuck to one part of our house while C and her group of ten-or-so seniors stayed in another part. Seemed like everyone had fun. Once things got going S and I kept to our room to stay the hell out of the way.

Closing Time

We closed the pool on Friday. It was sunny and 80° when the guys were shutting it down, the water still at 78° despite me not running the heater in a week. I think you call that perfect timing. Of course, the girls hadn’t been in the pool since August. I had been using it, but as I’ll share tomorrow, I haven’t been able to get in for a week or so, meaning we closed it a week late. Since I wasn’t running the heater I didn’t mind.

Then Sunday morning S and I first cleaned up the leftover pumpkin messes from the girls then stored away all the pool furniture and other summer goodies into the pool house for the winter. Our pool deck is now naked. Appropriately it was super breezy and gloomy while we were doing that, and 15° cooler than the day before. This week looks super fall-ish, although another warm-up is forecast for next weekend.

Colts

The Colts couldn’t get it done against pathetic Jacksonville a week ago, but did enough to win against the equally pathetic Titans this week. Man, Will Levis is fucking bad. Anthony Richardson, who sat out again, may end up being a bust. I’d rather have a dude that can only play every third game than Levis, who throws some of the worst balls I’ve ever seen. Maybe he figures the game out and turns into a solid QB eventually. But watching him Sunday, I was glad the Colts passed on drafting him a year ago.

The crazy thing about watching the Colts is that if they could ever get healthy, they really should have a plus offense. They have two really good receivers in Michael Pittman and Alec Pierce. Josh Downs showed Sunday that he might be better than those two. And AD Mitchell has loads of potential although he has a long way to go. Old Man Joe Flacco gets them the ball just enough to be dangerous. If you can keep Jonathan Taylor on the field, easier said than done, you have terrific balance. Of course, you can’t keep him on the field and there is no decent backup. The O-line has improved, even losing one starter for the season.

But that defense? Woof. They make just enough plays, especially against a shitty team like Tennessee, to make you think they might be decent. But they aren’t decent at all, even allowing for missing important players up front and being too thin on the back end.

Feels like a season that ends in 5–7 wins and puts them too deep into the draft to get a player that can immediately plug a gap next year.

Fall Break

It’s appropriate the weather has finally changed, as this week is the girls’ fall break. They are in school today and tomorrow, then off the rest of the week. We are traveling to Denver to visit our family out there. It looks like we will have a 20° temperature swing while we’re out there, too, so packing could be tricky. Obviously a lot more about this next week.

Running Out of Time

August 9, 2017 / DB

People right at my age grew up at the very tail-end of the Space Age. In the late 70s we weren’t too far removed from the glory days of the Apollo program. I remember our school library being stocked with cool books about both the missions to the moon, and others that focused on theoretical trips beyond the moon that seemed imminently possible in 1978. With the Space Shuttle program in full gear in the early 80s, it was a fairly regular occurrence for the big TVs to be wheeled into our classrooms so we could watch the latest launch or landing.

I also remember learning about the Voyager missions, which in the late 70s had just begun. Their time scale seemed so far into the future: they wouldn’t complete their intersections with the known planets until 1989!

Of course, now the original mission for the Voyager crafts is much further in the past than it was into the future back then. This New York Times Magazine look at the team that still run the Voyager program is fascinating. Like so many things over time, at some point it becomes more costly to train new people to join the program than the return on that investment. So the team is filled with people who have spent almost their entire adult lives monitoring and caring for the Voyager crafts, and those folks are steadily peeling off due to retirement.

Baring a collision with another object, the probes will continue to race through space for billions of years. But NASA’s lifeline to them will run out in the very near future, closing a door on a huge chapter of our space history.

I highly recommend reading through this.

The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA’s Voyager Probes Across the Universe