Friday, June 18, 2004

And that's all she wrote, folks! The Never-Ending Class from Hell and the World's Most Boring Book are a thing of the past. I have no idea what kind of grade I will end up with. I never even bothered to read the final version of my study group's project. My oral presentation was perfunctory at best. It was all the enthusiasm I could muster. So it's over and I get the next two Thursday's off. I will be busy making appointments to get my plow fixed up, my truck fixed up, myself fixed up, etc. I've had a pretty serious sinus infection since we went to Florida a month ago, and it isn't getting any better. That hasn't helped my performance in this class (or anything else for that matter; when you can't breathe, you don't care about trivial things like work, church, etc.).

Not much else going on. I hope to have some time tomorrow to fire up the inverter, get all the settings plugged in, and give it a run with its new set of batteries. It will be interesting to see if I can get the well and furnace working this time. The furnace is just a matter of getting the right settings in the inverter. The last time I tried it, the generator would kick off every time the furnace came on because I had max amps from the generator set too high. That's easy to fix. The well pump is going to be a problem, I think. If I set it up to work with the inverter, it won't work running straight off the generator, and visa versa. I need to figure a way to set things up so it's easy to switch back and forth. I'd also like to get the generators switched around so I can have some electricity in the cabin. We need to finish packing up and moving things out of there and get the place cleaned up. We may need it for company this summer.

We have a big event Saturday with the youth group, but it's one that another family does all the planning for. We just have to show up. I'll probably work the phones tonight and try to boost the attendance somewhat. There are several people I need to talk to anyway.

Nothing other than the usual politics in the news. The bright spot for the summer is the Cassini probe's final approach to Saturn. Expect a flood of incredible pictures over the next few months. We will be seeing photos from vantage points never before possible at resolutions never before dreamed of. And lots of them. The entire time the Galileo probe was at Jupiter, it had to rely on the low-bandwidth, backup antennae because the main dish jammed while opening. Cassini's high-bandwidth dish is functioning perfectly thus far, which means gigabytes of photos and other data. The most interesting part of the mission to me personally is the Huygens probe that will be dropped into the murk of Titan. We already know that there are organic compounds in the atmosphere. If Huygens finds oceans of organics on the surface, as some now speculate, that will show that massive amounts of what we consider to be organic compounds can be created by inorganic processes. That isn't much of a surprise in itself, but this would be the first time we've seen it up close on another planet (or in this case, a moon). Abiogenesis research will have a field day. Life could get interesting for people of a certain religious bent.

Anyway, enough for now.

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