kicking back

We just spent three days in the Middle of Nowhere, Florida. Not wild-'n'-wooly middle of nowhere, but just equidistant from a couple of places you never heard of, Florida. We rented a nice rustic house on the St. John's River with Brandy and Christina, and just kicked back.

Of course I wrote every day and (as expected) got more done than usual. Get up a few hours before everyone else and there's not much to do but write. Not even a newspaper to waste a half-hour's worth of morning. Finished the Larsson novel THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO and liked it a lot; will read the other two in the trilogy later. Didn't have the second one with me, though, so moved into Elmore Leonard.

The Larsson novel did have a couple of consistent flaws that might be characteristic of modern Swedish writing or might be artifacts of translation. I was often confused as to which character was talking, in one-on-one conversations, even when the characters were otherwise quite different and well described. That can be a problem in any language, of course, since any writer has a natural voice that's sort of a default pattern. One big trick in writing fiction is in consistently deviating from that default in different ways for different characters.

The novel was very heavy with information, but being a sci-fi guy, I'm used to that. Suspense was handled well; the novel has genuine surprises. Even though I remembered the movie pretty well, a couple of twists jumped up and slapped me.

(The characterization of the tattooed girl, Lisbeth Salander, was translated to the screen with creepy fidelity. Really good acting and screenwriting.)

Besides reading and enjoying idleness by the river, Brandy and I played a lot of guitar. He finished writing a new song, a good one. I had a few parodies I'd never played for him, like "The Sci-Fi Po-Mo Blues" and "Mommas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Vampires." Brandy's a full professor of English at the U. of Florida, who's been playing longer than I have, and is better. Christina is semi-retired from dancing and teaching yoga. (She used to be our masseuse, and we biked together, which is how she met Brandy.)

The above written Friday night. Going into town tomorrow.


Good observing Saturday morning, the little Questar perched on the river's edge. Mostly roamed the southern skies, the star fields of Scorpius and Sagittarius. Spent some time gazing at Saturn in a pretty steady sky. The Cassini Division was clear, and I could just barely convince myself that I could see the transient white smear that's been in the astro-news. Spent an hour, much of it just sitting back in the deck chair enjoying the night. Waiting for meteors, which didn't come.

After an hour it was 5:45, and I went in to drink coffee and write for another hour. It started to get crepuscular out, and so I went back and trained the scope on Venus, rising. Nice bright gibbous phase, but of course no detail. For a goof I maximized the power (8mm eyepiece with stacked Barlows) up to about 600X. The image was surprisingly sharp, though wobbly with thermals and showing strong chromatic aberration – Venus was red on one side and blue on the other. (The theoretical maximum for a 3.5" scope is 175X, and the Q gives about that, 189X, with the 8mm. The built-in Barlow gives a factor of about 1.7, for 320X, and my outside Barlow doubles that.)

Joe