Randy’s Blog

Monday night, the Oklahoma Sooners baseball team won the national championship, in what is, without a doubt, and without any exaggeration, one of the most improbable runs in the history of college baseball!

OU started the regular season red hot, winning a bunch of games, and jumping into the top 10 nationally. But they quickly cooled off, and struggled throughout the middle and end of the season. They finished the regular season unranked, and in 11th place in their own conference!

Prior to the NCAA tournament, OU lost 7 of its last 9 games. They didn't pitch well, giving up 9 or more runs in 8 straight games. They didn't hit well, scoring 4 or fewer runs in 8 of their last 13 games. If you don't pitch well or hit well, you're not going to win many games. In their first and only game of the SEC conference tournament, OU lost to a bad LSU team.

So, naturally, once the NCAA tournament started, OU went on a heater and won the national title.

It makes no sense. But it happened!

And OU went through the most difficult path any team has ever faced in winning a national title, going back to 1999 when the current playoff format was adopted. To win the title, OU had to:

• Beat the #2 seed twice (Georgia Tech -- and this was the best Georgia Tech team of all time!)
• Beat the #3 seed twice (Georgia)
• Beat the #5 seed twice (North Carolina)
• Beat the #7 seed (Alabama)
• Beat the #15 seed twice (Kansas -- also the best Kansas team of all time!)

The wild thing is that many of those games weren't even close. That's because OU suddenly started bashing home runs left and right, and used freshman starting pitchers who suddenly dominated opponents!

OU hit 95 home runs during the season. A ridiculous 30 of those home runs came in the final 3 weeks!

As a USA Today writer says:

There's getting hot at the right time, and there's going full-on supernova. That's what Oklahoma baseball just did, and it'll be remembered forever.

A Louisiana Sports article also provided some good perspective:

• Last season, in college football, 11th place in the SEC was a tie between Florida and Kentucky. Both of them immediately fired their coach.
• Last season, in college basketball, 11th place in the SEC was a tie between Oklahoma and Auburn. Both teams missed the 68-team NCAA tournament. Auburn went to the NIT tournament and won it all, becoming the 69th best team in the country. Oklahoma went to the Crown tournament, which is a notch below the NIT.
• And yet, this year, in college baseball, 11th place in the SEC was good enough to win the national title.

That seems to indicate there's something different about baseball from other sports. Here's an excerpt from an outstanding article in Baseball America driving home that point:

“I don’t know what it is about the game,” [OU's coach Skip Johnson] said. “It’s the spirit of the game. It protects those guys who continue to work at it and attack it, and it exploits the guys that are afraid of it and they’re timid.”

That is the heart of Oklahoma’s championship—and maybe the heart of the sport. Baseball is ruthless enough to expose everything, but patient enough to pay back the teams that keep coming. The season is long enough to reveal flaws, and the tournament is volatile enough to reveal growth. There is time to be ordinary, time to be doubted, time to be wrong about yourself, and then, if the talent and timing and guts line up, there is still time to become unforgettable.

The final score in Monday night's game was 13-2. It was Oklahoma's first national championship in a "big 3" sport (baseball, basketball, football) since the football team's title in 2000, which also had a final score of 13-2! Talk about a weird coincidence.

Boomer Sooner!

Last night, I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind. At one point, there was a scene where strange lights appeared outside a house. I paused the movie there and went upstairs to make some popcorn. When I looked out the window, I saw an eerie glow! We went outside and took some pictures:

There was nothing paranormal about it, however. We'd had storms earlier in the day; the sky was still overcast, and this was right around sunset. We were seeing light from the sunset diffused through the clouds. It definitely looked weird, though, and was very appropriate given the movie I was watching.

I'd never seen Close Encounters before. I thought it had some really good moments but was a little boring. I'm sure it was mind-blowing when it came out, though. Wendy was quick to point out that the main character was a terrible husband and father. He completely abandons his family to go chase UFOs, and he gets rewarded at the end with all the glory!

The main reason I watched the movie is because we have tickets to see Disclosure Day this weekend. Both movies are directed by Spielberg, and I thought it would be interesting to compare them. I'm both looking forward to and dreading Disclosure Day. On the one hand, it's Spielberg, so it will surely be an entertaining movie. On the other hand, it might help popularize UFO narratives that have long since been discredited. But we'll see.

Lately, I've been learning a lot about NICAP (National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena). It was a fairly popular UFO organization created in the late 1950s that ran for several decades. One thing I've learned is just how little things have changed since then. The belief that "disclosure day" (the day the government announces UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft) will be "any day now" has been around for over 60 years!

I can hear my high school history teacher, Mrs. Stubblefield, even now, saying, "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it."

I've mentioned before on this blog how I joined the CoCoRaHS organization a number of years ago, which involves submitting daily precipitation reports. Measuring rainfall is quick and easy. Measuring snow, not so much. They don't just want to know how much new snow fell, they want to know the density of the new snow (aka, the snow-to-liquid ratio), as well as the total snow (old and new combined) still on the ground. All of that can take a while to measure!

There's a whole protocol for measuring the snow-to-liquid ratio that involves taking a core of snow from a snow board and determining the amount of liquid it represents, by either melting or weighing the core (weighing is much faster). It's kind of tedious, but also kind of fun, because I like snow, and I like collecting data, and I like contributing to science.

Which is why I was thrilled to get an email from CoCoRaHS last week, out of the blue, telling me that the snow data I've submitted was "used in a recent scientific publication about using machine learning to better predict snowfall and storm impacts."

The email mentioned how a couple of winters ago, CoCoRaHS sent out a survey to people who regularly recorded snow measurements to verify that we really are following the protocols. I had forgotten all about that survey. Based on the responses, I was one of over 900 observers whose data was used in the paper. And, using that data, the model that researchers created “outperformed existing methods” used by the National Weather Service.

How cool is that?!

The email also linked to a long and interesting article about snow density and how this study will help create better snow forecasts. You can read it here:

https://waterdesk.org/2026/05/machine-learning-snow-to-liquid-ratio/

I'll just say it again: How cool is that?! Getting that email pretty much made my week.

After several years in a row of below-normal rain and below-normal snow, the pond near our house was quite low and looked very sad. Here's a picture I took of it on February 27:

In April, we got a LOT of rain. Over 10 inches, which is the most I've ever recorded in a single month since I started measuring precipitation for CoCoRaHS in 2019.

Here's what the pond looks like as of yesterday, May 17:

Between those photos, 15 inches of rain fell. It helped a lot, as you can tell, but you can also see in the second photo how high the water has been in the past. Hopefully it continues to improve, but May is off to a slow start. I've only measured half an inch of rain this month, which is 22% of normal for this area. It's feast or famine, apparently. No in-between.

A couple of nights ago, I went on an evening walk a bit later than usual. At one point, I saw a raccoon walking through someone's yard, so I stopped to watch it. When it saw me, it darted up a tree and eyed me warily:

Then it climbed around to a different branch and took another look at me:

I left it alone at that point and continued on. I wouldn't be surprised if I've seen that same raccoon on my trail cam in the past.

A few assorted notes:

OBAFGKM

In college, I took an Astronomy 101 course where we learned about a stellar classification system that ranks stars by their temperature using the letters O, B, A, F, G, K, M. O-type stars are the hottest and M-type the coolest. To remember the right order, we learned the mnemonic "Oh Be A Fine Girl Kiss Me".

That's not the most appropriate phrase, however. During a presentation at a recent local astronomy group meeting, an astronomy professor said he has his students come up with new mnemonics. The best one they've come up with so far is "Oil Butter And Fat Gonna Kill Me".

Canned Tomatoes

Buying tomato products in a can has to be one of the most bewildering experiences in the grocery store. Are you looking for:

• diced? petite diced? organic? sauce? paste? whole? crushed? fire roasted? peeled? puree? san marzano style? sun dried? no salt added? with basil/garlic/olive oil? stewed? Italian style? with ghost peppers? with green chilies? with onions? with lime/cilantro? mild? hot?

And many of the options above are repeated for different brands. Do you want:

• Store brand? Hunt's? Rotel? Red Gold? Cento? DeLallo? Contadina? Dei Fratelli?

And then you get to pick a can size. Do you need:

• 6 oz? 8 oz? 12 oz? 15 oz? 18 oz? 29 oz?

The mind wobbles.

Titanic Exhibit

The Volo Car Museum is not too far away from us. It's primarily a car museum, but over the years they've added extra exhibits, like a dinosaur park, military equipment, boats/trains, and a Titanic exhibit.

A few weeks ago, the Titanic exhibit flooded on April 15, the 114th anniversary of the Titanic's sinking.

"The flooding is not a publicity stunt. I wish I was that brilliant," says the museum's marketing director. The Chicago Tribune ran a story about it here.

The museum claims other spooky events have occurred on the site, like "sightings of apparitions, security camera footage capturing items flying off shelves, as well as experiences from staff members and visitors." Last year the museum even offered paranormal tours of "strange occurrences that have made this site legendary."

Classified Cinema

A movie theater near us has a "Classified Cinema" series where each Monday night you can watch a new movie before it's released, but you don't know beforehand what it will be. Tickets are only $6. They'll tell you the movie's rating, its genre, and an approximate runtime.

Today they offered a special Sunday afternoon edition of Classified Cinema. The movie was described as family-friendly, rated PG, the genre was mystery, and the runtime was 1 hour 50 minutes. After a bit of online research, the only upcoming movie that fit those criteria was The Sheep Detectives. I saw a trailer for it a few weeks ago and thought it looked good, so we crossed our fingers, bought tickets online, and went to see it.

And we were right! It was The Sheep Detectives, and it turned out to be a fun and charming movie. Recommended, especially if you like mysteries. Or sheep.

Our cat Chili has had a very rough go of it the past few months. And that means we've had a rough go, too.

It started in February, when he suddenly started walking into and out of the litter box constantly (and I mean constantly!) all while making very distressed meows. We called our vet and they said to bring him in right then. We learned that urinary blockages in male cats are considered a straight-up emergency; the longer you wait, the worse it will get. So we took him in, they sedated him, put in a catheter, and were able to flush out his bladder. He seemed okay after that. They said this type of thing can happen when the weather changes, weirdly, and that week had seen a sudden warm-up. They also had us switch him to a urinary-care specialty food.

That was all well and good, until about three weeks later, when it happened again! He was meowing all around the litter box. This time, matters were made more complicated because our vet had an emergency health issue of her own! She was in the hospital having surgery. She was the sole veterinarian at that business, so when we called for advice, her office recommended we take Chili to the emergency animal clinic. We did, and they determined Chili had another urinary blockage, and he had bladder stones and needed surgery! ☹️

We left him there for a couple of days while he had the surgery and was monitored post-op. When we could take him home, they said he had to wear a cone for about 10 days, and be confined to a small room, so he didn't run and jump around too much. He also had some meds to take.

We followed all those directions dutifully. A week later, though, it happened again! More constant, painful litter box meows. By this point, our vet's office was bringing in substitute vets on a day-by-day basis. We went in to see one. She tried unsuccessfully to put in a catheter, so she recommended we take him to the emergency animal clinic again. So, back we went. The vet at the clinic also could not get a catheter in. The only option left at this point was PU surgery. They described it as an operation that basically turns a male cat into a female cat. I won't go into the details. You can look it up.

However, this was on a Friday afternoon, and the clinic didn't have a surgeon who could do the surgery over the weekend, so they sent us to a specialty clinic closer to Chicago.

(A quick aside: several months before all of this, I went to a presentation at our library about disaster preparedness. The speaker had lots of good recommendations, one of which was never let your car get below half a tank of gas. You never know how far you'll have to drive in an emergency. That's great advice. And neither of us followed it. As we were rushing Chili around from vet to clinic, both of our cars were on empty. So we had to stop and get gas before we could go to the specialty clinic, and as I stood there pumping gas, I kept wishing I'd followed the speaker's advice.)

So we drove Chili to the specialty clinic, and we were amazed at how nice it was. Wendy said she's been in people hospitals that weren't as nice as this animal hospital. She was right! We left Chili there for a couple of days while he had the surgery and was monitored afterwards. For the record, this was Chili's second surgery in two weeks!

When we brought him home, we had a lot of meds to give him on a daily basis, and he had to wear the collar for another two weeks. A few days later, we took him to the vet to have the sutures from his first surgery removed (we saw another substitute vet because our normal vet was still recuperating).

After a few weeks, there was one weekend where Chili started to seem like his old self again. He'd come downstairs and hang out with us, and sit in some of his favorite spots. Then all of a sudden he regressed, stopped coming downstairs, and just sat in one spot all day. When he did walk around, he kept his belly close to the floor.

That didn't seem right, so I called the vet's office. They didn't have a substitute vet that day, so I wound up taking Chili to the emergency animal clinic again! This time they determined he had what they described as a "raging" urinary tract infection. They gave us some antibiotics to give him for a week. Thankfully, it helped.

After a week, we took him to the vet, where we saw another substitute vet. She said his PU incision was looking good and the collar could come off. Finally!

However, over the next few days Chili kept licking his incision a lot, and that didn't seem good. Back to see another substitute vet. This one said "Nope, the collar needs to go back on for another couple of weeks." ☹️

So now here we are. I'm happy to say that our normal vet is back from her medical leave and we've talked to her on the phone a couple of times. Chili's next appointment is on Friday; we're hoping we'll be able to see her for the first time since all of this started in February. Chili still isn't back to his normal self, though. It might be because he's been stuck wearing a collar for a month and a half now. He's lost a lot of weight, too. We'll see on Friday if he's gained any of it back.

If you're thinking that all of this must have been expensive, you're right! "Mind-blowing" is the phrase I'm thinking of, and not in a good way. I'd never considered getting pet insurance before, but now I really wish I had!

This has been a long post. I just hope Mr. Chili keeps getting better!

Way back in 2011 (fifteen years ago!), I created an astronomy app for Android called Star Odyssey. The idea was you could go outside at night, and the app would pull up a list of all the bright stars currently above the horizon and provide some basic info about them, like how the star got its name and any interesting astronomical facts about it. You could also sort the list of stars by brightness or distance from Earth.

It also integrated with a planetarium app called SkEye (not created by me). After reading about a star in Star Odyssey, you could click a button to launch SkEye, which would point you to that star's location in the sky.

It was a lot of work to create the app, considering I had to not only build the app but also do research on 70+ of the brightest stars in the night sky. But it was the app I wanted, and nothing like it existed at the time.

I updated and maintained the app over the next several years, but the pace of change in Android was so fast back then that it became hard to stay up to date. The last update I made was in 2015.

In 2022, Google announced that Android apps would have to be updated within a rolling two year window in order to be findable in Google Play. I tried at that point to modernize the app's source code so I could release a new version. I made a lot of progress, but ultimately I got stuck and gave up. At that point, Star Odyssey became no longer available.

2026 has ushered in the widespread adoption of AI in the software development world. I'm using Claude Code at work, and it is, at times, shockingly good. So I signed up for a personal plan with Claude Code and asked it to help me update Star Odyssey to run on modern devices. And it worked! Turns out I wasn't too far off in my 2022 attempt.

After getting the app working on my phone, I used the free version of Gemini (Google's AI) to walk me through uploading a new version to Google Play. A lot had changed since 2015, especially around how developers cryptographically sign their apps to prove they're the owner.

After all of that, I have finally released a new version of Star Odyssey, the first in over 10 years! I am enormously pleased to have it working again on my phone.

If you want to try it out, you can find it here, or just search for "Star Odyssey" within Google Play on your device. Feedback is welcome!

As amateur astronomers like to say when ending a message: Clear skies!

We've had a fairly frigid cold spell here recently. We didn't get above freezing for nearly 3 weeks, and didn't get above 20 for about a week. There was one day where the high temperature was -4! I'd read a few articles about ice coverage on the Great Lakes, and that got me thinking about driving to Lake Michigan to see what it looked like. We did that many years ago during one of our first winters in northern Illinois.

So last weekend we drove to the Illinois Beach State Park, and here's what we found:

It was very windy (and cold!), which made for choppy conditions on the lake:

There weren't many people there, as you can tell, but we were surprised to see a steady stream of cars entering and leaving the parking lot. One other lady had the same idea as us. She arrived right as we got there, walked around the beach a bit just like us, and then left shortly before we did. We didn't have to stand out in the elements for too long before deciding it was time to go.

Before leaving, we each posed in front of the lake:

And right before we left, the clouds cleared up enough to get a nice view of the Chicago skyline:

So that's what Lake Michigan looked like. I thought there would be more ice, to be honest. The next day I saw a WGN graphic showing the ice coverage on all the Great Lakes:

The temperature got above freezing today, and will hit the mid-40s next week, so we might be around peak ice coverage now.

Last year, in my Lunar Eclipse blog post, I mentioned that one of the books I was reading at the time was The Moons at Your Door, which is a collection of weird/horror short stories. I finally finished reading it a few months ago. One of my favorite stories from the book is called Sredni Vashtar, written by Saki (a pen name for Hector Hugh Munro). It's a rather dark tale about a boy and his pet ferret, or perhaps I should say a boy and his ferret god.

The story has stuck with me ever since and, of all things, has given me an appreciation for the "slow enjoyment" of eating toast. It's a fairly short story and is available to read online in several places, like this one:

https://www.classicshorts.com/stories/vashtar.html

I was thinking about it this morning as I was eating scrambled eggs and toast.

Let me know what you think if you decide to read it!