It is 0441 San Diego time, and I've been up for over an hour. My trip here is only two days this time, and so I will once again stay on East Coast time, which today necessitated a 0330 wakeup. It's been a busy hour already, what with the publication (below) of my little letter to Rand Paul and a few other irons I have in various fires--but the work ends in a quarter hour when I head to the gym. Had a horrible setback on Friday when I weighed in with NO LOSS. That's right. A repeat 164.8 very late in the game. In order to now achieve my goal (159.9) by June 27 I must drop 1.3 lbs a week...which means fewer net calories (as my carb intake is already less than 50 a day). Bottom line--I am in a bit of trouble--especially when considering I have a six day trip to Norway coming up....
I watched a tremendous movie on the plane yesterday, starring the ubiquitous Benedict Cumbertacth. Called "The Imitation Game", it is the story of British mathematician Alan Turing who led the team that broke the Nazi's "Enigma" code in World War II. Chemically castrated in 1952 for the crime of homosexuality, he committed suicide soon thereafter. Considering what he was responsible for, I shudder to think of how robbed the planet Earth was by his death. It is well and good that such laws no longer exist.
I am staying at a hotel now for the second time, as it seems to have all the things I like and need. Good wifi, a gym, plenty of parking, near places I want to eat, and not too bad of a drive. They are a tad niggardly with the coffee supply, but I've broken the code by asking for a few packs when I walk by the front desk.
My flight out was delightful (see movie review above), as there was no one in the middle seat and the guy at the window never got up. It doesn't take much to thrill me, but this surely did. I landed at 1830 to a beautiful San Diego evening, but truth be told, the weather in Maryland has been more to my liking lately. Things have been absolutely beautiful around the farm, and the magnolia's are in bloom--something that leads to wonderful smells all around the house as the Kitten keeps a constant rotation of freshly clipped blooms. She was throwing a little party for eight lady friends yesterday as I was leaving, and I managed to slip out before having my theory that most people don't understand the operating principles behind a circular drive, tested. I'm sure it was a cluster.
Kitten #2 graduates from 8th grade on Friday, and the week is two-blocked with events. Parties, awards day, graduation, grandma's arrival, etc. It all seems a bit much, but then again, they've gone to school in the same place for 9 years together, so maybe it's a bigger deal than I imagine.
All in all, a good day! I agree that The Imitation Game is worth the time. And I can't believe you wrote "niggardly" without a trigger warning.
ReplyDelete"niggardly" - I thought the same thing TigerHawk
ReplyDeleteI just don't get celebrating "graduations" that aren't graduation from HS or college. To me, anything else smells too much like "everyone gets a trophy for participating".
There once was a British subject named Henry Moseley. He was educated at Trinity College Oxford. When war broke out in 1914 he enlisted and was given an Enfield 303 and sent to an obscure location near the Dardanelles Strait called Gallipoli. He was killed in action.
ReplyDeleteHis contribution to science was significant, and had he lived there's no telling what he could have accomplished.
So this ain't the first time the British class system has cut off their nose to spite their face. Get ready, that very system is being adopted here, as we speak.
"Moseley's law advanced atomic physics by providing the first experimental evidence in favour of Niels Bohr's theory, aside from the hydrogen atom spectrum which the Bohr theory was designed to reproduce. That theory refined Ernest Rutherford's and Antonius van den Broek's model, which proposed that the atom contains in its nucleus a number of positive nuclear charges that is equal to its (atomic) number in the periodic table. This remains the accepted model today."