Reruns

I stole this graphic from Bad Astronomy, who in turn stole it from Abstruse Goose. It's pretty clever. Click it to make it big enough to read.

The premise is pretty simple: the signal from a show that aired 10 years ago is now 10 light years away, part of an ever-expanding sphere of electromagnetic signals emanating from our planet. Thus, the singing nine-headed cat people on Beta Aquilea are now doomed to watch old reruns of Gilligan's Island and The Munsters. Whereas the telepathic floating dirigible worms of Formalhaut are fortunate enough to kick back over the latest episodes of Night Court and Punky Brewster.

Lucky bastards.

Heart of the Neighborhood

There is a big green park in the center of our new neighborhood, about a block and a half away from us. S got a new big-girl bicycle for her 8th birthday a couple weeks ago, so we've been doing a lot of riding there. We're making the transition from sidewalks to streets, so the resultant freedom and danger is a little scary.

For us. Not for her.

There are usually kids to play with there. Our old neighborhood was mostly old people who never went outside, and the few houses that had kids living there rarely let them out the door (I guess on the debatable premise that television is safer than the outside world). Here, we have all sorts. The band of little boys from the house at the bottom of the hill who pants are always threatening to fall off, and who are incapable of not hitting each other every fifteen seconds. They play rough, but they're fun to watch. There is an 11 year old girl across the street the girls treat with the kind of awe previously accorded only to unicorns and Santa. This weekend we met a teenage couple who wander out far away from the playground to lie in the grass and neck.

It's a lower income neighborhood, mostly Hispanic (our kids are Hispanic, we are not). Lotsa old houses, some large and grand, some small and rickety, in varying degrees of upkeep. I'm guessing there's alotta sweat equity built up in these homes. Most have porches, and people actually hang out on their porches here, to catch that early evening summer breeze. The house right before the park has two very loud and very mean dogs, who the girls try to tiptoe past as if they were guardian trolls.

According to the previous owner, the railroad baron who built our house laid out the streets of the entire neighborhood, to mirror the one he grew up in back in England.

Nothing British about it anymore. It's about as American as you can get.

Death of the Bamboo Princess

The Japanese spacecraft Kaguya crashed into the moon last month. Before it did it shot some amazing HD footage of the moon, much of it viewable on YouTube, like this one. I don't know the name of this crater (as the captioning is in Japanese), but is sure is pretty.

Kaguya is named after the bamboo princess in the 10th century Japanese folktale, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. A childless woodcutter finds a tiny baby growing inside a glowing bamboo stalk. He takes her home to raise as his own. She grows into an extraordinarily beautiful woman. At the end of the story it's revealed she is not of this Earth, but rather a child of the moon, sent to the Earth for her own safety. The citizens of the moon take her back to her home against her will. Her parents are grief-stricken.

Teenage Wasteland

Those mysterious space blobs are now a little less mysterious. To recap: last month astronomers found powerfully energetic blobs--the scientific paper actually called them "blobs"--at the very edge of observable space, some of most distant objects ever recorded. At the time the leading theory was we we witnessing the violent births of baby galaxies, with baby black holes at their centers.

As it turns out, they are teenagers. They are galaxies going through all sorts of crazy changes before maturing and stabilizing. James Geach, the lead researcher of the study, said that the chaos "is due to the violent processes occurring in the galaxies, black hole growth, starbursts, mergers. They're having a final 'tantrum' before they're done growing and then 'passively' evolve to the present day.

Sound familiar?

---

NPR was reporting rather breathlessly last week that Enceladus, the geyser-spouting moon of Saturn, has liquid salt water seas under it's crust. It might be true: Cassini flew through the geysers last year and, according to one set of scientists, found evidence of salt water in the geysers. That is deeply cool, in that salt water oceans were the cradle of complex life on Earth. However, the same issue of Nature has a paper from another team of scientists from Boulder, who say there isn't enough sodium in the samples to support the salt water ocean hypothesis. So the jury is out.

And NPR is a little bit busted.

Ghosts

Furniture and piles of boxes drift around the house like ice floes. The larger chunks--couches and tables and comfy chairs--have found their spots in corners, along walls, in the center of rooms. The smaller bits, us included, float about bobbing among them, unanchored.

I love the house. I hate moving.

Here's a cool story about the house I heard from the previous owner. Apparently it was the home of a railroad tycoon, and when he died at the railyard, the railroad took over the house and permitted the widow to live there, as long as she offered the second floor up to boarders associated with the railroad. She went along with the arrangement. I imagine she had no choice. I like to look down the length of the second floor hallway and picture what it might have looked like. Almost makes a person wish for ghosts.

Almost.


Another story: the guy who told us that one, the previous owner, lovingly restored the place with his wife. They lived here eight years. Then they divorced. Clearly he loves the place. You can tell by the way he talks about it. He has mentioned several times now the parties they held in the backyard, the Christmas lights, the goldfish pond, the patio. How it all looked. Or how they found the fireplace at an estate sale and the hassle involved in getting it shipped here. Most of these wistful anecdotes end abruptly, as he moves on to another subject, embarrassed, distracted. Houses are a pretty potent metaphor for marriages, for families, for lives. Gotta be tough to fix one up, only to turn around and sell it.

He's kind of a ghost here too. Along with the railroad widow.

We'll add our own histories to the house, eventually, and become like ghosts ourselves, our stories passed along by word of mouth. Or blog, in this case.

There are no stories yet. We're still unpacking.

Symmetry

There is a pleasing symmetry to receiving a Happy Father's Day blessing from your kids in the morning, and passing one on to your own Dad in the afternoon.



The only blemish on the day was provided by those damn Mets.

Sneak Peek

Stairs leading down to the front door. And to one of the countless piles of unpacked crap, there to the right of the door. That's a hand-painted mobile of the solar system, on top of the box.

Dig that groovy colored tile at the base of the stairs.



Living room. Yes, those curtains are pretty gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

And the wooden fireplace mantle and frame is deeply, deeply cool.



A handful of wooden doodads that will eventually be added to the fireplace around the mirror as detail.



Detail from one of the doors.



More detail from one of the doors. This is a metal panel laid into the wood, about where your hand lands when you push the door open. Which I assume is the purpose. There are lots of these about the house.

We are all moved in. Exhausted, and a little overwhelmed. But we did it.

Back to work.

Remember To Breathe

We have the loan. We close tomorrow. Insert huge sigh of relief here. The competent and hard-working woman in charge of processing the loan told us a full hour before our loan officer called us with the news.

We are now the owners of a new home. And an old one too, as it turns out. Anyone need a cheap place to live?

We're off to the Sand Dunes within hours of signing, as it's a vacation that's been on the calender for a year, and reservations are made. So we don't actually begin moving in til Monday. It'll be a welcome break.

Banking trivia: The following types of people and/or things are actually qualified to be "loan officers" at the Bank of America: Dogs. Dead people. Circus clowns. Lawn clippings. Small piles of shiny objects.

Okay. I'm done venting. Time to move on.

Ghost Blog

There was a blogger out there back when I first started blogging named Jo. She was a LA-based painter/photogrpaher, thoughtful and funny and talented. Some of you out there may have followed her. One day she causally mentioned that she and her husband were taking a look at a new house.

And she was never heard from in the blogoshere again. In that arena, anyway. Her blog is still out there, but it's like a ghost blog, unchanged for the last 8 months or so.

I'm hoping that won't happen to me, as we enter the hellish sucking vortex of closing on the new house.

Still battling with the hallowed financial institution which rhymes with "Skank of America" to get the loan finalized by the closing date. I get the sense my "loan officer" is doing bong hits in the bathroom stalls betwixt calls from me asking him what paperwork is still needed which he neglected to tell me about 2 weeks ago.

Hard to believe these guys had to be bailed out by the government.

Courage.

Sermon

From the nearly perfect Synecdoche, New York, which I finally saw last night:

"Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you'll never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. Even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope for something good to come along. Something to make you feel connected, to make you feel whole, to make you feel loved. And the truth is I'm so angry and the truth is I'm so fucking sad, and the truth is I've been so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long have been pretending I'm OK, just to get along, just for, I don't know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own, and their own is too overwhelming to allow them to listen to or care about mine. Well, fuck everybody. Amen."

Amen.