Monthly Archives: October 2007

Night

Does Size Matter?

This week’s full Moon will be the largest full Moon of the year. The two days to get outside and enjoy the largest full Moon of 2007 are Thursday and Friday. I lifted this article below from SpaceWeather.com for your perusal if you are interested in more information.

This week’s full Moon is the biggest full Moon of 2007. It’s no illusion. Some full Moons are genuinely larger than others and Thursday night’s will be a whopper. Why? Read the answer below.




The Moon’s orbit is an ellipse with one side 30,000 miles closer to Earth than the other. The full Moon of Oct. 25-26 is located on the near side, making it appear as much as 14% bigger and 30% brighter than lesser full Moons we’ve seen earlier in 2007.In the language of astronomy, the two ends of the Moon’s orbit are called “apogee” and “perigee.” Apogee is the farthest point, perigee the nearest: diagram. This week’s full Moon is a “perigee Moon” with extra-high “perigean tides.”

The Moon is 14% bigger, but can you actually tell the difference? It’s not so easy. There are no rulers floating in the sky to measure lunar diameters. A fun experiment: Take a friend outside Thursday night and ask if they notice anything unusual about the Moon. Explain perigee after they answer.

Jay, Movies, Video

Possible Preview

This might just be a preview for a new feature of this website or at the very least, a new endeavor for yours truly and Mr. Janson. If you do not see a video below, your boss is blocking YouTube.


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I am planning on going to see Things We Lost in the Fire this Sunday, so the review could conceivably be up some time next week.

Jesse, Nature, Work

First Crack

3 Comments

I took my first crack at some fall pictures during my lunch break today. I wasn’t 100% pleased with anything. However, I will go back out for my lunch break tomorrow with a guy holding an umbrella. That guy is Jesse. It is good to have him back at the mine.

Hopefully I will be able to get what I’m looking for tomorrow. I’ve made a commitment to only eat out for lunch one day a week in an attempt to eat healthier and save some scratch. This has been going pretty well and it opens up my lunch breaks to pursue my other interests.

Below is the best of what I captured today.


10-19-07

10-19-07

10-19-07

10-19-07

Football, Iowa State, Movies

Texas Sized Beatdown

“Sorry don’t get it done, Dude. That’s the second time you hit me. Don’t ever do it again.”

-John T. Chance
Rio Bravo (1959)

The Iowa State-Texas game was over about 2 minutes into the sad, sordid affair. It was a rainy, gloomy day. The pictures from this debacle are up on the website any way. I think the highlight of this new gallery might be a picture of Jay on his way to a lumberjack competition.

Iowa State vs. Texas

FNSC, Night

Whoops!

You know how newspapers can print absolutely anything despite the facts and then when somebody actually calls them on it they run a retraction buried on page 12F in the smallest font imaginable? Well I’m not a newspaper. I’m not anybody even pretending to be a news outlet. So I’ll print my retraction right here.

This weekend wasn’t the weekend when fall colors are going to peak in Central Iowa. It is next weekend. I made this mistake because I still haven’t gotten any quality sleep and I labored under the thought since Friday that this weekend was the weekend of the 20th.

So I will celebrate next weekends fall color explosion (although predictions are for a moderate explosion at best) with going on a train ride.

I did go out with my new toy on Friday night, but realized that I forgot to grab a battery. So I had to drive back to Boone after FNSC. By the time I got back out to a relatively low light pollution zone, the clouds that had parted while I was at McFarland Park had come back. In the end, it was a fairly barren source of amusement.


10-12-07

10-12-07

10-12-07

Blogging, Derrick, Faust, FNSC, Football, Frank, Jay, Music, Schmidt, Steph

A Very Non Exciting Announcement

I was counting up the ways that a person could make contact with me and I decided that I needed one more way. So I actually took the time and energy and told the guy that hosts my website (Frank) to give me an address at my own domain. So now if you want yet another e-mail address to write to me at:

bennett@photography139.com

There might* be a prize for the first person that e-mails me at my new address.

I am excited that this weekend will be the peak of fall colors this year in Central Iowa. I hope you are able to spend some time outside this weekend to enjoy the beauty of nature. I think I might just celebrate by taking a train ride.

The Fausts are going to be joining FNSC this evening. They have been given the rare privilege of picking the location for FNSC. This is a very rare honor only given to the most highly regarded. They did not make a mistake with their choice. They have chosen the West Street Deli, which is home to the world’s best club sandwich. I’m not joking about it. If you haven’t had the club at The West Street Deli you are missing out.

Tomorrow is an exciting day as well. The Iowa State Cyclones will attempt to BBQ the Texas Longhorns. I have little doubt that the Cyclones will leave Jack Trice Stadium victors, but that isn’t why tomorrow is so exciting. Tomorrow is exciting because Jay and Derrick are attending their first Faust tailgate. They will get to witness first hand Faust doing his Johnny Cash impersonation (it involves standing on the cooler) and after the game, they might get to see him bust out the Humpty Dance. Although the real highlight of any Faust tailgate is watching him yell at Bret over the music selections. Nothing is better than Faust getting mad when Bret won’t play “Not as Good as I Once Was”. He points at his damaged foot and screams, “That’s my song. I’m not as good as I once was”. Priceless merrymaking.

I should make a confession. Almost a month ago, Stephanie gave me the Sufjan Stevens album Illinoise. She was really interested in me giving her feedback on my thoughts about the album. I think she was hoping for me to just agree with her that it is one of the greatest albums of all time. The problem is that she also gave me a copy of the Eric Lindell album Change in the Weather. I just can’t bring myself to listen to the Sufjan Stevens album because I LOVE the Eric Lindell album so much. In fact, I’ve taken to surrounding myself with a constant flow of music from the following albums: Echoes, Silence, Patience, and Grace** by the Foo Fighters, Change in the Weather by Eric Lindell, Once the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, and Every Second Counts by Plain White T’s. I hope to add Shannon Curfman’s album Fast Lane Addiction to the mix, but I have to find some place that is selling it first. Stupid Best Buy. Stupid Target. I’ll get to Sufjan, I swear it. Just not on anything important.

I received some exciting news this week. I’m not ready to share that information yet, but if you want a sneak peek, you can head over to the FUMC in Boone on Wednesday night at 7 pm. You will want to go to the parlor. There are a couple of strings attached. You have to be a woman, lady, female, or girl and you have to be interested in knitting, crocheting, quilting or something of that ilk. I’ll just leave this tease stand for now. Hopefully I will have a picture next to make you understand why I’m excited. Well I can’t make you understand anything. It will be an illustration of my excitement though.

I got another new toy for the “rig”*** a couple of weeks ago. I’m hoping to go out tonight and get some use out of it. If everything works out there might be some interesting night pictures in our future. Makes you wonder what toy would help with night photography, doesn’t it!

*By “might”, I mean there isn’t a prize.

** Even though Schmidt from work disagrees with my assessment, I think this album is pushing “The Colour and The Shape” for the title of the best Foo Fighters album.
*** Terminology used by the dude who annoyed me a couple of weeks ago.

Jesse, Work

Renaissance

“Every renaissance comes to the world with a cry, the cry of the human spirit to be free.”

-Anne Sullivan Macy

Jesse has been sitting on his couch for the last eight weeks watching reruns of Hannah Montana and dreaming of a day when he could return to his office at the computer mine. Today he walked into the mine and handed me a note:



You might not be able to read the scribbling of a doctor, but I can assure you that this note says that Jesse will be returning to work on Monday. He is pretty excited to be returning to work, even though he will miss Hannah, Lilly, Jackson, Robbie, Oliver, and Rico.

Writing

Slake

I’ve always been the type of person that feels that anybody that is getting much over 6 hours of sleep is a big iris*. How much sleep does a person really need? Do you want to spend 1/3 of your life or more sleeping? 25% is all the sleep time you are getting out of me lifetime!

For the seventh straight day I’ve gotten close to 8 hours of sleep. This has not made me a well rested and content individual. On the contrary for 7 straight nights I’ve had very vivid dreams, the entire night. I would not say that they are weird dreams. One of the word orderings that escapes the mouths of others that annoys me the most is “Dude, (yes most of my friends start their sentences with the term ‘dude’ because they are surfers) I had the weirdest dream last night.” Almost all dreams are weird compared to our daily existence. For me to have a dream I considered weird in the context of the dream world, the dream would have to be completely mundane.

I would fall asleep and have a dream where I was making macaroni and cheese on the stove, while watching re-runs of Scrubs followed by The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. This would be weird, because every day that I don’t have a post computer mine social engagement, I go home and make and eat supper while watching re-runs of Scrubs, The Daily Show and The Colbert Reporton Comedy Central. It would also be weird because I hate macaroni and cheese. I even hate cheese and macaroni.

It is weird because I am not the type of person that usually remembers their dreams. I can literally go months without remembering a dream. That is the ideal situation for me. I can’t shut my brain off during my waking hours. Not really. If I am awake, I am thinking. I have problems shutting my brain off to go to sleep. I finally learned in the last few years that the best way for me to shut my brain down and fall into the sweet darkness of rest is to listen to talk radio. The banality of Michael Reagan or the Coast to Coast guy allows my brain to just shut off and give me a break from it.

I’m not a person completely devoid of dreams. I have one recurring dream that I thought would have gone away at least 5 years ago, but instead still waits to meet me in the night on occasion. I also on occasion have the dream that predicts the future. When I write that these dreams predict the future, I don’t mean they predict the future in the way John of Patmos, Nostradamus, or fortune cookies (I’m still waiting last fortune cookie fortune) predict the future. More in the way that I’ll be in a sometimes mundane event and have an overwhelming feeling of already having this experience and then I will realize that I dreamed this event a few days prior. While this phenomenon (although in actuality almost a statistical certainty rather than a coincidence or divination) did occur at least once last week, these are not the type of dreams I’ve been experiencing.

The dreams have been very vivid. The problem is that I’m not getting my vacation time from my brain. The problem is that I’m sleeping longer than I normally do and when I wake up, I’m more tired than I was when I went to sleep. Every morning I wake up and feel more tired than I did the day before.

So if my brain short circuits in the next few days and I do something stupid like get into performance art or buy a Kid Rock CD or eat at Happy Joe’s or watch CSI: Miami or read US Weekly it isn’t my fault. My brain has permanently shutdown.

*I recently learned that the President of the Central Iowa United Way receives $153,058 in compensation, so I’ve decided that I need to start my own charitable organization. My charitable organization is going to attempt to raise awareness about the toughness of the pansy and defame and humiliate the iris based on its feebleness. This new charity has yet to have a name.

Art, Sara

New Post Secret Book

Today is the day the new Post Secret book is released. To celebrate an event of this magnitude, I’ve decided to throw up some of my favorite postcards from the past. (Okay in reality a lot of these postcards are the ones currently on the Postsecret website.)


Sara is currently taking a class on “Art Therapy”. This is the first time since her return to higher education that she has taken a class that sounded interesting. Sara is the person that really turned me on to PostSecret. Today she is doing a presentation on PostSecret for her Art Therapy class. This weekend I spent some time downloading the video below off of YouTube and putting it on a disc and teaching her how to use VLC. She is just hours from using the video in her presentation. I know that it will go well. I’m an excellent teacher. I have posted this video before, but I’m posting it again because I like it so darn much.


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