Monday, April 5, 2010

rain makes applesauce

That's the title (and tagline) of a children's book that coloured my childhood.

I took an unintentional 6 mile walk today.
I'd intended to walk a few miles with a friend. Fortunately my day was flexible and I just stayed later at work to make up the time and finish things up. It was simply too beautiful not to walk all the way out to the ocean. Our readjusted plan still would have made that a reasonable lunchtime stroll -- we were just going to grab transit back. But public transit failed us -- the train was "broken" and they promised a shuttle bus "as soon as possible". We've heard such things before, being veterans of the local transit system, and just headed back up the hill. We'd made it more than halfway back before the bus passed us.

It was a striking weather contrast to the weekend. Sunday afternoon I had a date with a friend for a run. Both of us were adamant that we were going rain or shine, and we tested that out thoroughly -- it was a downpour a lot of the time we were out. My shoes were soaked within the first quarter mile. It was a lovely and fun run, punctuated by pullups and jumping jacks and random parcourse stations. I came home an hour later drenched but grinning. A vast improvement over the tired and cranky from before the run; we had wonderful guests over for dinner the previous night but stayed up talking and drinking until well past 3am.

I interrupt this post to say I have the BEST spouse ever!. El Bandito has been making dinner and just came dancing in and out of the doorway purely for my entertainment. He makes me laugh like no one else.

But giggling for 5 minutes has completely derailed my train of thought.

We went to another astronomy lecture last night; this one was on high-energy imaging of supernovae. In the Q&A after the talk, a young kid asked "isn't everything you've said really just guesses?" Great question. Welcome to science, kid. It's a lot of guesswork. A lot of "this is the best explanation we have come up with that fits the data we currently have". Handled with aplomb by the speaker, who basically said "Yes, of course. Keep up with your math and physics, and come help us make better guesses."

There's no real point to this post, other than to say, despite some frustrations, I really like my life.