Randy’s Blog

Here are a few notes from our recent trip to Saint Augustine, FL:

• Midway is my least favorite airport ever. We try our best to avoid it, but this time it was the only place we could get a direct flight to Jacksonville.
• We parked in the economy parking lot, which, we discovered, isn't even paved. It's just a gravel lot. And costs $15/day.
• It took 40 minutes to check our bags in the "Express" bag-check lane.
• When we arrived at our rental house in Florida, there was a black cat sitting in the driveway. I took it as an auspicious sign. Any superstitions I had about black cats are long gone, thanks to Gordon.
• A lot of houses near our rental house had rooftop porches, so they could have a good view of the ocean. The house right next to ours also had a personal weather station on their roof. Now I'm starting to think I should get another weather station. I had one for a few years, but it eventually stopped working.
• One night during our visit, there were a bunch of reports of a fireball and a loud, window-rattling boom over North Florida. Some people in Saint Augustine saw it, but unfortunately we did not see or hear it. A security camera captured a video of it.
• We had two days of perfect weather: sunny and mid-70s. It cooled off after that.
• The view from our rental house was fantastic.
• The sound of the ocean was also fantastic.
• The corn cakes at Mango Mango's were delicious.
• The Mexican UFOs at the Burrito Works Taco Shop were delicious.
• The ice cream at Coneheads was delicious.
• We bought some girl scout cookies when we stopped at a Walgreens. Tagalongs and samoas are my fave.
• I enjoyed the Alligator Farm much more than I thought I would. There were so many crocodiles and alligators. The albino alligator was really cool, but Maximo was the main attraction. He is a 15-foot 1,250-pound crocodile.
  
• We walked up 219 steps (14 stories) to the top of a lighthouse. The views were great, but my calves were sore the next day.
  
• We went to Fort Castillo de San Marcos. It was built in the late 1600's out of coquina, which is a type of rock made up entirely of sea shells. Apparently it is strong enough to build a fort out of it, but soft enough that cannon balls would sink into the stone rather than shatter it.
  
• Our flight home was delayed almost 4 hours due to congestion at Midway.
• Driving home from Midway was a mess because we hit rush hour traffic. Our phone's GPS navigated us through a labyrinthine route of side roads to avoid the standstill traffic on the highway.
  
• When we got home, Gordon poked his head out of the upstairs bathroom, meowed twice, and then came down to greet us. Later we noticed there was a big pile of cat hair on our bed, right below my pillow, where he must have slept. I took it as a sign he missed me.
  
• The temp got down to -6 the first night we were home, and -10 the second night, which set a new record low for that day (the previous record was 0).
  

There's a lot more I could come up with, but I'll stop there.

I'm working my way through season 5 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. They must have gotten a major upgrade in the special effects department prior to this season, because for the first time the computer graphics look really good.

I hadn't watched any episodes for a few weeks, because next up was a two-part story called "Unification", and I wanted enough time to watch them back to back. Last night, as I was flipping through the TV guide for something to watch, it hit me that this was the perfect time to watch those episodes. The plot of "Unification" features Ambassador Spock trying to forge an alliance between Vulcans and Romulans. They were the only episodes in which Spock ever appeared in The Next Generation. And earlier in the day I learned that Leonard Nimoy had passed away.

So I watched both episodes in honor of Spock. I had forgotten what a great voice he had. And I discovered, oddly enough, that Gene Roddenberry had passed away shortly before these two episodes first aired in 1991. There was a message at the beginning dedicating both episodes to him. That was an odd coincidence.

Here's to Gene Roddenberry and Leonard Nimoy.

It's winter. Which means much of what I've been doing the past few weeks and months is reading books, shoveling snow, and watching college basketball, with a bit of hockey thrown in. Here's what I've been reading:

The Young Oxford Book of Timewarp Stories

Most of our books are downstairs, on the Billy bookshelves from IKEA. But there are a couple of small shelves upstairs. One day when I was upstairs, I looked over, and happened to see this book. I'd completely forgotten about it. It's an entire book devoted to time-travel short stories. "That sounds awesome!", I thought. "How have I never read this?" So I started reading.

And the first story blew me away. It's called My Object All Sublime by Poul Anderson, and even though it's only 10 pages long, it is dynamite. I loved it. So much so that the next day I was still thinking about it. What a great story to lead off with.

The first half of the book is really strong. It also includes The Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, which is where the butterfly-effect idea originated, All the Time in the World by Arthur C. Clarke, and The Love Letter by Jack Finney, which was later made into a movie. (After reading The Love Letter, I realized I owned another time-travel book by Jack Finney, Time and Again, which I started, but never finished, a long time ago. I vaguely wondered where the book was now, and later I noticed it had been on the shelf right next to this book.)

The second half was still good, just not quite as great as the first half. Overall, this book was a lot of fun to read. And it had a page that listed similar books from the same publisher. Here's a sample:

• The Young Oxford Book of Ghost Stories
• The Young Oxford Book of Nasty Endings
• The Young Oxford Book of Aliens
• The Young Oxford Book of Nightmares

Those sound like great fun!

Astronomy and Culture

I'm totally impressed that I read this book. It was a bit too scholarly for my taste, but was just (barely) interesting enough to keep me reading. It's part of a series called the Greenwood Guides to the Universe. Each book costs $70 retail, so I think they're more geared towards libraries than consumers (I got it at a book sale for a quarter). This book details how astronomy has influenced cultures from prehistory to the present. 

A few interesting tidbits:

• When parts of Europe switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, they had to drop 10 days from the calendar. So in 1582, October 4th was immediately followed by October 15th. However, not all countries switched calendars at the same time. Sweden, for example, decided to gradually adopt the new calendar. Their plan was to stop adding leap days for 40 years. So every 4 years they would drop one day, and at the end of 40 years, they'd be in sync with the Gregorian calendar. They started this plan in the year 1700. However, their almanac makers accidentally added leap days in 1704 and 1708, throwing the plan into such disarray that they decided to scrap it entirely. When 1712 rolled around, they added back their normal leap day, plus an extra one to make up for the one they skipped in 1700. Thus, they had the only February 30th in history. What a mess!
• The Copernican revolution wasn't just a scientific revolution, it was a fairly devastating psychological blow as well. Learning that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe really knocked mankind down several rungs. No aspect of life was unaffected. The book even says the feminist movement can be traced back to the Copernican revolution.
• Not everyone bought into Copernicus' ideas. One guy wrote a book arguing against it, and he gave it a doozy of a title: The New Planet no Planet: or, The Earth no wandring Star: Except in the wandring heads of Galileans. Here Out of the Principles of Divinity, Philosophy, Astronomy, Reason, and Sense, the Earth's immobility is asserted; the true sense of Scripture in this point, cleared; the Fathers and Philosophers vindicated; ... and Copernicus his Opinion, as erroneous, ridiculous, and impious, fully refuted.
• The book had lots of old illustrations, many of which were provided by the History of Science Collections at the University of Oklahoma Libraries.

My Friend Dahmer

This is a graphic novel that received tremendous praise and won numerous awards when it came out. Time magazine listed it as one of the Top 5 non-fiction books of 2012. It's written and illustrated by a guy who was friends with Jeffrey Dahmer in junior high and high school. I was a little apprehensive reading it, but fortunately it doesn't go into detail on Dahmer's crimes. It mainly focuses on his school years, and on what the author remembers about a troubled kid that almost no one paid attention to. It deserves the awards and praise it received. It's really good. The art is all black and white, and visually distinctive, with a lot of attention to detail.

One incredible story the author tells is that one year in high school, his class went to Washington D.C. for a week, to see how the government works. The last day there was a free day, and while several of them were walking around trying to figure out what to do, they joked about going to see the vice president. Dahmer suggested they actually try it, and he went to a pay phone, got the vice-president's office on the line, and sweet-talked them into letting a group of high schoolers come in right then for a visit. A few minutes later, Jeffrey Dahmer and his classmates met Walter Mondale and got a tour of his office. It's almost unbelievable.

The most astonishing thing is how none of the adults in Dahmer's life, neither teachers nor parents, had any idea he was so troubled. But the students knew. They saw him come to school at 7:30am completely drunk, and hang around long after school was over, still drunk. It's a sad story, but it's told really well.

Shortly after we got our cat Gordon (which was 3 years ago today!), I decided to put out some bird food, thinking he might find it entertaining to watch the birds. So I got a brick of suet, put it in a little cage, and hung it on the railing of our deck. It sort of worked. Gordon did sit by the patio door and watch the birds, but after a few days, the squirrels discovered it, and the game was over. Whenever I put out a new brick of suet, they devoured it the same day. What I needed was a squirrel-proof bird feeder, but I had a feeling such things existed only in theory.

About a year later, I got some promotional material from the Northern Illinois Food Bank after making a donation to them. There was a story about a guy, who lived in Northern Illinois, that had designed a squirrel-proof bird feeder in his retirement, called SquirrelAway. He partnered with the Food Bank so they got a portion of all sales. You can read about how he makes it squirrel-proof on the Features page.

I was a bit skeptical, but my birthday was coming up, so I added it to my wish list, and Wendy bought it for me. I built a stand for it out of a series of half-inch pipe (there's a diagram of how to build it on the FAQ page) which is fairly cheap and easy to make. I installed it in our backyard, near the large window in the basement. After a bit of trial and error, I discovered that waste-free bird food is the way to go, so that you don't wind up with a pile of shells underneath the feeder.

That was a year and a half ago. Here's a video I recorded last year:

It works! I've been very happy with the feeder (and even happier that I was able to get video of the squirrel falling). The birds love it, too. There was one day last fall where we counted over 20 birds in our backyard, most of them sitting on the fence waiting for their chance at the feeder. It's usually not that busy, though. But it's more than enough to keep Gordon entertained. He likes to sit on the window sill in the basement, crouch down like he's about to pounce, and watch the birds eat. Every so often he'll forget about the glass and try to pounce. We'll hear a thud, and look over to see Gordon with his front paws on the glass, meowing at a bird.

Many of the squirrels have adapted to the feeder, and now collect all the crumbs that the birds drop on the ground. However, a couple Saturdays ago I got to watch a squirrel try five times in a row to get to the feeder, only to fall off each time, just like in the video. His effort was admirable. It was also funny, because after each fall, he stood up on his hind legs and looked straight up at the feeder, like he was already trying to plot his next attempt. I wish I'd had a video camera handy, but I didn't.

And going back a few more weeks, I was stunned and slightly disappointed to see a squirrel had somehow managed to get to the bottom of the feeder. I have no idea how. But, because he had to use all four legs to cling to the bottom, and because his head was too large to fit into the food ports, he still wasn't able to get any food. After a few seconds he gave up, let go, and made a fairly graceful landing on the snow.

So I would say it works as advertised. I recommend it!

• Dave Roman is a graphic novelist whose blog I've been following ever since I read his book Agnes Quill: An Anthology of Mystery. He recently posted about a very strange hobby of his: watching every animated/puppet Christmas special ever produced. He listed a few of the weirdest ones he watched in 2014. One of them was A Cosmic Christmas, which aired in Canada in the late 70's. He recommended it and linked to it on YouTube. I watched it and loved it. It's about 30 minutes long, and is broken up into 3 parts. Links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
• In the winter issue of the JSE, I learned about Hans Berger, the man who invented the EEG. He had a telepathic experience that inspired him to search for the biological source of psychic activity. He thought the brain might be emitting a subtle field of energy, which led him to create the EEG.
• Shawshank Residuals - This article is mainly about how The Shawshank Redemption is still earning money 20 years after its release, but it also has lots of interesting tidbits about how the movie was made.
• AstroBob is my blog of choice for astronomy news. It's run by an amateur astronomer who works for a newspaper in Duluth, MN. I love that when there's something interesting to see in the night sky, he always posts detailed star maps on how to locate it. A few weeks ago he wrote about how to see Comet Q2 Lovejoy. Last week we had four clear nights in a row, so I got a chance to view the comet each night. Using my binoculars, it looks like a fuzzy spot, but it's steadily getting brighter. I was able to see it last night even with the full moon. Over the next few weeks it should become visible to the naked eye. Today he posted about the comet again, and provided updated star maps. 

When it comes to UFO evidence, I tend to be much too skeptical and dismissive of videos, photographs, and "official" documents. It's much too easy to fake these, and there's no way to prove they're real. All you can do is prove they're fake. So I typically ignore that type of evidence, probably to a fault. What interests me the most are the stories people have. Hearing the account of events from people who were there. What they saw, how they felt, how they dealt with their experience afterwards, and how they feel about it now. That's what sticks with me the most.

This summer I read Encounters with Star People: Untold Stories of American Indians, a book comprised entirely of that type of evidence. I discovered it through the summer issue of the JSE which covered it in the book review section. The book is written by Ardy Sixkiller Clarke, a retired professor from Montana State University. As I alluded to a few posts ago, this is the most fascinating book I've read in a long, long time. So hold onto your hats, because this is wild stuff.

The book starts out with an interesting note that a number of American Indian researchers and journalists prefer the term American Indian over Native American, when referring to tribal groups as a whole. Part of the reason is that anyone born in the Americas is, by definition, a Native American. They also claim that most American Indians do not object to the word Indian, even though it is a misnomer. So I'll follow their advice and use the term American Indian.

Now for the good stuff. The author is herself an American Indian. She and many others grew up hearing about the Star People from their grandparents. The stories claim that the Star People came to the Earth from the Pleiades star cluster, and that Indians are descendants of them. As a result, when many of the older American Indians see a UFO (which apparently happens much more often than you'd think), they react as if they're seeing family members. By contrast, many of the younger Indians, who are more heavily influenced by mass media, often react with fear of "aliens".

Over the course of her career as an educator, the author collected stories from American Indians about their encounters with Star People. It's likely that only an insider could have written this book. Several people had never told anyone about their encounter, until her. Often times she had to get to know a person first, sometimes even doing small favors for them, to build up enough trust before they would reveal their encounter. In return, she promised them confidentiality, by changing the names and locations in their story. Over time, she became friends with several of the people, and she developed a reputation as the "UFO lady".

The book has over two dozen stories, which vary greatly. Some are chilling, some are touching, some are sad, and some are so wild they would make a great X-Files episode. There were a few common elements, though. For example, everyone who reported seeing a star person/extraterrestrial, said they were humanoids (head, torso, 2 arms, 2 legs). There was some variation (some said the being reminded them of an insect), but they all had the same basic shape. A number of people communicated with the beings, but in hindsight they couldn't recall if their communication was verbal, or if it was some form of telepathy. Finally, and most interestingly, several elderly people stated they weren't afraid of death, because they knew when they died, the Star People would come for them. And in several cases, UFOs or extraterrestrial beings were spotted the day that person died, or the day of their funeral.

A few examples of some of the stories:

• A snow plow driver in Alaska was working during a major snowstorm when he happened upon a UFO sitting in the middle of the road. Several extraterrestrials were outside repairing the craft. Startled, they hurried back into the ship and took off, but left one being behind in their haste. Rather than moving fluidly from one spot to another, the being seemed to teleport from spot to spot. The driver gave the being shelter in his truck (it was 70 below zero outside), and talked to it while he continued on his snowplow route. The being said where he came from, everyone teleports like he does, and we could do it too, if we learned how to use our brains the right way. It was also fascinated by the mechanics of the snowplow, and expressed bewilderment that our scientists hadn't investigated magnetic propulsion more thoroughly.
• A man went camping in the desert by himself and was stunned when a Star Person literally walked up to his campfire and started talking to him. The being said he was on a mission to gather soil and plant samples from our world, and couldn't resist the chance to talk to an inhabitant of the planet. He said he would get in a lot of trouble if his superiors found out about his infraction. The man asked if it was true that extraterrestrials were abducting humans. The being replied his species did not, but there were others that did.
• A teenage girl, whose parents owned a horse ranch on a reservation, said she and her family saw UFOs on an almost weekly basis. One day, a UFO appeared as a ball of light, flew up to her, and transformed into a Star Person. It said it had been coming here a long time, had seen her grow up, and watched her take care of the horses. It asked her about the digestive system of horses, saying they brought horses to their home planet, which were now dying but they didn't know why. The girl answered as best she could, but wasn't sure she was much help. A few years later, she decided to study veterinary science in college, and said she hoped the being would come back after she had graduated.
• A 92-year-old man, who was a respected elder in his community, and was described as the last chief of the northern plains, claimed that the Star People lived on Earth up until the white man arrived in America. He said they warned the Indians the white man was coming, suggested they leave the planet, and brought spaceships for those who chose to go with them. Many went, but many stayed.

There are lots of other fascinating stories I would love to write about, but I should probably stop here to encourage people to buy the book if they're interested. There are several great quotes I wanted to share, though. Like this one, from a man on why he never told anyone about his experience:

We are proud people. Everything we knew and told the white man, he changed or used to his own advantage. When we told him our history, he said it was just legends. We told him our ancient myths; he discounted them. Why would we tell them about the special relationship we have had for centuries with the Star People? They would say it was myth. We have our secrets, and sometimes it is best to keep them that way.

Out here in the mountains, you see a lot of things. I can tell you many stories, but the most frightful occurred right here on my front porch. It's a sad state of affairs when them aliens can come and take you right out of your house and the government claims they don't even exist. I'd like to bring one of them Congressmen out here and let him be abducted. Maybe then they would change their tune. Maybe George W. or old Daddy Bush. Give them a dose of reality.

I don't like talking about UFOs. People around here keep quiet about such things. We don't want a bunch of white people running all over the reservation looking for aliens. They can do that in Sedona. We like to be left alone.

So what to make of all this? On Amazon, the book has well over 150 reviews. Many people said they couldn't put the book down. I had the opposite problem. I had to keep putting the book down after each chapter to process what I'd read, and to try to figure out if we really live in a world where these bizarre stories are true. I finally decided that if these stories are true, they're just the tip of the iceberg, so the whole truth is likely far more bizarre than this.

So that's my book report. Take it with a grain of salt, or a grain of truth.

Oh, and one more exciting thing: the author has collected enough interviews for two more books. The next book is focused on interviews with people from Central America, and it comes out next week! I am eagerly looking forward to it.

Notes:

1.  We got a new dishwasher recently, after getting fed up with our old one. It sounded like a screaming animal in our kitchen. So we went and bought a Kenmore Elite that's billed as the quietest dishwasher on the market. So far it's great. I love it. It cleans much better and dries much better than our old one. And it is crazy quiet. Now our microwave is louder than our dishwasher.

2.  We also got a new Tivo. The old one was rebooting randomly, and replacing the hard drive didn't help. The new one is a big step up. It has several new features I love, like showing a list of all the movies that are on right now, and a list of all the sports that are on right now. And it has six (six!) tuners. Our old one only had two! On Saturdays I like to put each tuner on a different college football game, so I can jump back and forth between them all and still be able to rewind if needed. I actually feel cheated when the Tivo changes a tuner to record a program for us. "Hey, I was using that!", I say. "Now I've only got five games to switch between!"

3.  The only bummer with the new Tivo is that I could never get it to fully work with the new wireless router I bought a couple months ago. I tried the old router with the new Tivo, and everything worked fine. So after exhausting all the ideas I had, and all the ideas I could find on the internet, I went out and bought yet another new router. This time I went with a Netgear Nighthawk. And thankfully it worked with the new Tivo. So it's been a relatively expensive couple of months.

4.  It was almost a year ago that I sat down to watch something, anything, on TV, and there happened to be an animated show called Adventure Time that was just starting. The episode was called Simon and Marcy. It was weird and bittersweet and I loved it. Wendy was hooked, too. Over the next few months we watched every episode that aired, learning all about Finn the Human and Jake the Dog, and all the bizarre inhabitants of the Land of Ooo. It is easily the most imaginative show I've ever seen. And after a long hiatus, new episodes began airing this week! Tonight we watched a new episode called Jake the Brick, where Jake fulfills his lifelong dream of being a brick. It was bizarre and charming and lovely.

5.  This has been a cold fall from the very beginning. I never got a chance for any more bike rides, which was disappointing. So my season total ended at 129 miles.

Links:

• The eruption of Krakatoa was so loud it circled the Earth four times. There's a great YouTube video in the article showing a volcano erupting in Papua New Guinea. You can see the shock waves as they head towards the camera.
• 90% of people hit by lightning survive, but they often suffer personality changes as a result.
• "He loved to write stories that children loved to read" -- A look at the tombstone of John Bellairs, one of my favorite authors.
• The world's tallest cow lives in Illinois.

I've made a bunch of updates to my Big 12 Sports river the past couple of weeks. Originally I was relying on my RSS reader to fetch and display all the feeds. Now I've written my own software to do that, so I have more control over the final product. There were several things I didn't like about the RSS-reader's version:

• It showed duplicate stories. If the Tulsa World had an article mentioning OU and OSU, it appeared twice, once under each school's feed.
• The length of each story varied wildly. Some had a short summary while others displayed the entire text of the article.
• The images were inconsistent. Some stories had images, some didn't. Sometimes the images were so large they ran into the story below them.

I was able to fix all of that by creating my own river. You can take a look at it here:

http://big12.randyl.org/

I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. Duplicates are gone; images are gone; and all the stories are roughly the same size. And in case you're curious, it updates every hour. I can't take credit for the design, however. A handful of others created a "Beautiful River" design that I incorporated, with a few tweaks.

A few months ago I picked up a programming book called "Taming Text", which is all about analyzing and manipulating text documents. It gave me several grand ideas of features to try out, which is part of what inspired me to create the river in the first place. I've put those ideas on hold for now, though. They would be a lot of work to implement, and it's already been a lot of work just to get to this point. 

As an example, I could apply classification algorithms to each story to determine what sport it covered. Then there could be tabs at the top of the river to switch between each sport. That would be useful when basketball season is in full swing, so you could easily see the football stories at a glance. Another grand idea is to automatically extract people's names from a story and display them as metadata under each link in the river. You could see who was mentioned in each story at a glance. I'm not sure how useful that would be, but it could be a fun learning exercise at the very least.

But those ideas are for a later day. In the meantime, I'll see how my current river works out.

A couple of summers ago, for some unknown reason, I found myself craving Star Trek: The Next Generation. I watched a lot of it growing up, and loved it, but I knew there were plenty of episodes I'd never seen. I started thinking it would be fun to watch the entire series, all 7 seasons, beginning to end.

My mind went to work. I knew you could buy the entire series on DVD. I began hatching elaborate plans to buy the DVDs, rip each episode onto my computer, transfer them all onto an external hard drive, and connect it to my Tivo, so I'd have every episode available with a few pushes of the button. I knew it would be laborious work, since I'd have to assign each video file with the right episode name and number, so I could tell what I was about to watch and what came next. But it would be worth it. Then I started figuring out what kind of external hard drive I'd need. How much space? What type is compatible with Tivo? How much would it cost? At some point I finally checked the price of the DVDs , and I was dismayed. It was way more expensive than I thought, and there were some negative reviews claiming a few of the discs didn't even work. My plans were ruined.

Which was a good thing. Because somewhere amidst that mental chaos it dawned on me that Netflix has the entire series available for streaming online, and it would only cost me $8 per month. Good grief! is what I thought. That would be so much simpler! What on earth had I been thinking? So I signed up for Netflix streaming and with almost no effort on my part (a few pushes of the button) I began watching Season 1.

And then I realized how much time this was going to take. Almost every season had 26 episodes. Each episode was 45 minutes. I planned to watch them casually, here and there, rather than marathon style. Getting through one season would take a long time. I couldn't even begin to guess how long watching all 7 would take.

Regardless, I started watching. Regularly at first, watching several episodes a week. But then summer turned to fall and college football consumed most of my TV time. I got back into it during winter, but then went through months-long stretches where I didn't watch any episodes.

At some point in there we switched our streaming service from Netflix to Amazon Prime. I discovered that Amazon had all the Star Trek seasons too, and was about the same price as Netflix, but also came with free 2-day shipping. So that sealed the deal. We switched and have loved it ever since. I was able to pick up Star Trek right where I left off.

Earlier this year, though, the Star Trek watching hit a snag, because of buffering. Episodes would pause at random places while more data downloaded. It was extremely frustrating. There were a few times an episode was unwatchable because buffering happened every few seconds. Around this time, "net neutrality" was in the news, so I figured Comcast was to blame. It had been shown they were deliberately slowing down Netflix traffic, and it wasn't much of a stretch to assume they were doing the same with Amazon. So I basically stopped watching for most of this year.

But then last month, a thought occurred to me. My wi-fi router was close to a decade old. What if the problem wasn't Comcast, but a router that was showing its age? That was reason enough to try, so I went to Best Buy and bought a new dual-band router that was able to optimize for streaming video.

And it worked! Not only is buffering gone, but the start-up time for a streaming video is much faster. I'm happy to report I'm back on the Star Trek watching bandwagon, and I just hit the halfway point! I'm three and a half seasons into the series, and season 4 is the best so far. It took me two years to get to this point, but I'm hoping the last half will go faster. I'm looking forward to it.

And in the back of my mind I keep thinking: maybe I'll watch all of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, too!

• I got an email today from Subaru letting me know that all national parks have free admission this Saturday. I clicked the Find a park link where I learned there's only one national park in the entire state of Illinois, and we've already been to it. It's Abraham Lincoln's home in Springfield. And on top of that, it's already free; there's never an admission fee.
• Lincoln's Pets: "When asked if her husband had a hobby, Mary Todd Lincoln replied, 'cats.'"
• A much longer article on Lincoln and animals.
• Black and white cat photography