Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas!

Best of the best

Perigee of the Full Moon

Tonight the full moon will be at perigee, offering sky-watchers a view of the biggest and brightest full moon seen since 1993. While we experience a lunar perigee every year, it infrequently coincides with a full moon. The next one will be eights years from now. Look for the full moon right after sunset as it is rising — it will appear impressively big!

This NASA composite picture, based on an image of the moon taken by the Galileo spacecraft, shows the apparent size differences between a full moon at perigee (the closest point in lunar orbit) and one at apogee (the farthest point), as seen from Earth.



You can still see Jupiter and Venus big as life early in the evening. Check out NASA's brief video about the sky in December.

Decorating

Last night we went out for dinner to Strawberry Fair, then to the Company Theater's Christmas show with B and B. My dinner was excellent and it’s a lovely restaurant situated in an old house. They had a man singing and playing a guitar and he was very good — he loved us, we were actually listening and applauding! The Christmas show was in two parts. The first was strictly singing and was fine. The second part was a short play about a small community church in NH trying to put on a Christmas play. The cast was largely youngsters, junior high and younger, and they were all very good.

DamCat’s house is starting to look a lot like Christmas! I hope she’ll take some photos. Queenee has done a bit of decorating around the house. We don’t bother with a full-blown tree anymore, but the small skinny tree is up as well as a little one in the kitchen window. She picked up these icicle lights in Costco a couple months ago — they were a bit pricey, but we haven't seen them anywhere since. I remember first seeing these lights in PA twenty years ago, but hadn't seen them since until now. They are very difficult to find, I can't even find anyone else who sells them so I can link to them.



Yes, it snowed! We weren’t expecting snow until Sunday night, but it actually snowed overnight last night and we woke up to see snow on the ground! It’s still snowing. I’ll post a little video later.

Another computer!

Dawg’s new computer arrived late Tuesday afternoon, about three weeks sooner than we had been told it would be here. I spent about five hours setting it up for him today.

Some nice things about this machine. It’s one of the small box computers and is much quieter than most of the ones I’ve seen. I wouldn’t want to run one more than an hour or so, the small form doesn't allow for much air circulation, but once hard drives switch from heat-producing disks to flash memory, the box will be even smaller and the heat won’t be as big a factor.

Also, finally, someone figured out that these big hard drives should be partitioned right from the start. It took over an hour to partition Deacon’s new computer, but this one was already done. I still moved all the user folders over to the new partition manually, but it was a good hour not spent doing the partitioning. Thank you Gateway/eMachines!

It came with 2gb RAM, a 19" LCD monitor and a Canon Pixma printer (on backorder, but no rush for that). It’s perfect for Dawg and Fluffy!

Happy birthday, Elder Pea!

Nineteen today! One more year of being a teenager!

EP had to work tonight, but spent the day decorating the Christmas tree with DamCat. Hope it was a good birthday, EP!