Night class
Listening to:They’re Playing Our Song – Cast Recording
Reading: The pile of magazines I’ve been accumulating
Weather:40, rainy
Trivia:What was the first spacecraft to visit a comet?
When Halley's Comet came through the inner solar system in 1986, spacecraft from Japan, the Soviet Union, and Europe were there to meet it. But six months before these spacecraft met up with Halley, another one had already made the first comet rendezvous, with a different comet. The craft was the International Sun-Earth Explorer 3, which was renamed the International Cometary Explorer (ICE) for this special mission. Its historic first comet visit was made possible by a unique, complex orbit that took it from its original station between the Earth and the Sun, past the Earth-Moon system five times, then looping out in a long arc that passed right through the tail of comet Jiacobi-Zinner. After the comet encounter, ICE coasted farther out into empty space, but in 2014 it will return to Earth, with fuel still in its tanks. Where will they send it next?
Cool word: osprey [n. OS-pree]
An osprey is a handsome, brown and white fish-eating hawk (Pandion
haliaetus), or it is a feather plume once used to trim women's hats. It might seem likely that the bird's name has something to do with prey. One of the word's two sources contributed this sense, but its evolution was also influenced by another lineage. The most direct source is the Latin avis praedae (bird of prey), which entered French as ospreit. Latin avis (bird) was also the source of various "flying" words including aviary and aviation, while praeda was the source of English prey. The second source was a confusion with a large vulture called osfraie in Old French. Its name came from Latin ossifraga (bone breaker), a reference to its habit of dropping its prey from a great height onto rocks.
My second round of adult education started tonight. This time I have a dozen people in the class, all in the fifty to sixty age range. Two don’t speak English.
Gulp.
They speak broken English, but primarily a language that is either Russian or Polish or of a similar origin.
This is going to be a challenge. I tell them to do something and they stare at me with these blank faces and deer in the headlight looks. One of them was so nervous her hands were shaking.
It is not my intent to intimidate anyone or to give them a breakdown. I’m afraid that it could happen this time.
There don’t appear to be any hummers or button pushers this time, but there are a few cut-ups. They seemed like a happy friendly group of folks.
Who are going to sap every once of strength from me by the time this is finished.
I stared again with trying to get them familiar with the mouse, and showed them where to find the Solitaire game so they could practice moving the mouse a bit. This worked well the last time. It didn’t work so well this time.
They didn’t know how to play solitaire!
It never dawned on me that this would be a problem. I thought that everyone in the world knew how to play solitaire. So I ended up giving them a lesson on how to play the game. I showed them where to find the instructions, but no one wanted to be bothered to read them.
The other thing is to get them to use the mouse with ….um….strength? I’m not sure how to put this, but what half of these people were doing was gingerly moving the mouse with two fingers as if it was going to shatter if they touched it or moved it at the wrong speed. It was all I could do to convince them that it was alright to pick it up and put it back down on the mouse pad if they needed a better position.
I kept saying, "Stop Being GENTLE!!!" No one was buying it though.
The night went by fairly quickly, but by nine my voice was fried. I was absolutely croaking. I’d had to talk far too much for too long a time.
I was grateful to go home.
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Horoscope
ARIES
You are standing on the brink of a new era, as you always are but it just seems so much more in tune with the dates at the moment, and you start to sense that you can do something about bringing long held wishes into being. The problem is knowing precisely how, but by giving your full emotional commitment and enthusiasm to what you intend, by believing in your vision, you can start to take the necessary steps instinctively.