What's New: 2010, A Tiggery year ....

I know that SBW is traditionally the one to open these threads, but I'm on a mildly alcoholic zhizz ....

A quiet evening culminated in the now traditional midnight pyrotechnics as the neighbours seek to outdo each other with ever more ambitious fireworks. I sometimes wonder at the fiscal sanity of such extravagant displays of conspicuous expenditure ... I mean: recession? What recession? Those all-in-one firework display "bombs" cost a serious amount of cash. The area resounded with explosions and star-bursts for the better part of 30 minutes, meaning that this one small neighbourhood set fire to several hundred thousand pounds worth of explosives.

Grandchild yet to make an appearance.

Famous last words.

I are a granny! A beautiful little girl entered our world at the traditional hour of 6am. All seems well. I'm so proud of my independent daughter! She and her partner snuck off to the maternity suite without fanfare or ceremony in the very small hours. 'Twas a wonderful, if not entirely unexpected, surprise to get a call from them a short while ago. Now I can't wait to go visit .... But I will wait till later on today, to give the new 'rents a chance to get their beauty sleep ... they're gonna need it.

Now ... where's that pink wool and my crochet hooks? An organised Granny would have knitted up a whole layettes in pink, blue, and yellow, before the first trimester was out. But I fear to tempt fate. Well, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

Congratulations, Grandma, to you and your daughter! What a fine, fine, beginning to 2010.

You have reminded me of the pink shaw I crocheted for my own daughter when she was about 3 or 4 feet high (a little bigger than an infant in arms.) Wonder if it's still around here anywhere? I've moved the household so many times since then...

It's a wonderfully quiet morning. I plan to play with my sims. But I was wandering around the internet and found a neat little article that gives us an idea of how big the universe must be, although it is actually only about our own solar system.

The author, Guy Ottewell, presents a lesson plan for showing young students the relative distances between the sun and the planets. He calls it The Thousand-yard Model, or The Earth as a peppercorn. He uses chestnuts, pecans, peanuts, and pinheads for the other planets, and an 8-inch ball for the sun.

At one point he said: "I once, having no eight-inch ball, made a colored paper icosahedron, and had to give chase from afar when I saw someone appropriating it. On the return from another walk, I met a man holding his mouth while his worried companion said "Did you bite it?"-incredibly, he had picked up one of the peppercorns! The other edible planets are, of course, prey for passers-by. Hazards like these may be regarded as our model's counterparts of such cosmic menaces as supernovae and black holes."

He describes another model: "Sir John Herschel, a wonderful scientist and son of Sir Williiam Herchel who discovered Uranus, proposed in his book Outlines of Astronomy (1849) a model of the solar system using peas, oranges, plums and the like. The scale he chose was too large, so that from the Sun to Pluto would have been 3 miles."

In Ottewell's model, the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, to our 8-inch sun would be 4,000 miles away.

Also, on a slightly different scale--if the earth were the size of an apple, the atmosphere (clouds and all) would be the thickness of the apple's skin.

I've always been fascinated by this kind of thing.

Thanks for that, Lynet. I love that kind of thing, too. I remember sitting down with my kids and some Plasticene and making a one inch earth and a quarter inch moon and placing them 24" apart to show the scale. I can't recall the numbers off hand but I think I calculated that on the same scale Alpha Centauri was halfway to the real moon and the sun was several hundred yards away and about 8 feet across. I also remember telling them that if the earth was scaled down to the size of an orange then the dimples deeper than any ocean.

But what really freaks me out is that there is proportionally more empty space in an atom than in the solar system. That kinda useless fact makes everything seems empty and ... well, weird. Or to quote Douglas Adams:

Happy New Year, everybody!!

Wow, that's really cool, Mirelly! Congratulations! Does this mean that your grandchild was born on the first of January? She must be lucky or something. That's really cool.

It is really cool, the birth of little babies. They put everything in persepctive, because it really doesn't matter how far away the sun is, as long as it keeps on shining for all the days of their lives.

I would like to wish you a very Happy New Year to all of you guys.

Congratulations Mirelly! What a beautiful New year gift...

Glad to see you, Mya! Hope we'll see more of you now that the holidays are at an end.

Happy New Year, Everyone! Congratulations on your new granddaughter, Mirelly. What did they name her?

I'm hoping to get my life back in order now that the holidays are officially over. My house is a wreck, my diet's in shambles, and I've been neglecting my story, but my daughter had a wonderful holiday that included a sleepover with 5 of her best friends so I think I can say it's all good.

I'm all fuzzy headed today. Hope it's not a cold. It's REALLY cold outside. The thermometer says it's 9 below but it feels colder. Or maybe I'm just getting old? Did the granny shuffle all the way to the train. I hate walking on ice. I can handle the cold, mostly, but the ice is something I could do without.

Still, not sure I'd trade it for Arizona summers, for example. That hot wind'll drive you mad.

Sacharissa and I saw Sherlock Holmes last weekend. Such a fun movie. See it, if you haven't. Robert Downey Jr. is an amazing actor and he and Jude Law are perfect in their roles. I was skeptical, but am no longer. Fun, sexy, funny, exciting, yet still true to the original: what else do you want?

New Year's Resolultions: oy. I've got too many. Lose weight, revise the NaNoWriMo novel, work on Connor's story, get my house in order . . . wish me luck.

I'm trying to keep my resolutions to a minimum--Eat Less, Exercise More.

Sure...easy ones...

You may ask why have I said, "Goodbye, Andromeda" with my avatar here? Just because it sounds cool, that's all. I have the picture blown up big on my desktop. I turned off my computer yesterday and said, "Goodbye, Andromeda," to the thing as I did so. Liked the sound of that, so now I call my iMac Andromeda.

Besides, since "Andromeda or Bust" won't ever happen, I might as well say goodbye. *sniff*

I haven't posted the name online. Call me paranoid, but I think the little scrap deserves her privacy. I'll email y'all with a pic as soon as I get one that does her justice. Mother and child should be out of hospital today. Had to laugh at my mum's reaction to becoming a great grandmother. She received a text with the news that ELH had arrived and, as H is my and my daughter's surname, dear old mum was confoozed ... shouldn't the babby have her daddy's surname? I explained that the NHS works in mysterious ways. Daughter and her partner are unwed, so the baby's mum was admitted to hospital under her own name and the baby is given her surname to avoid confusion. I expect they will register the birth with L's family name. Call me an old fogey but I'm still hoping for a wedding ....

Resolutions? One. To finish the saga of Perry Lane.

I don't think it's old fashioned to wish for a little stability in a baby's life. A little piece of paper can cut through a lot of beaurocracy. Totally understand about not wanting to post her name online: please do send private pictures, though! I love babies. I have a picture of Lynet's granddaughter as a (very) wide-eyed infant that pops up occasionally and makes me smile. She looks so startled.

Spent part of Sunday with the in-laws and their three little ones (2, 6, and 8) and was very glad that wasn't me. I'm enjoying 12. She can help out around the house and occasionally make her own food.

I'm feeling very depressed about the state of my house. It's so messy I can barely think. I know the solution, but getting started is daunting.

I think I am getting sick. Phooey.

Hope you feel better soon, SBW.

And try not to think of the housecleaning all at once. Maybe just one little piece at a time. It will happen eventually. And if it takes a while, that's OK. And if you're feeling under the weather and probably worn out from all the holiday demands, it may seem more overwhelming than it really is.

I always give myself frequent breaks as a reward for completing a task...like putting the laundry in the machine. Or making the bed. You're right. It takes me forever and ever to clean house. Obviously, I take the break in front of my computer.

Yeah, hope you get well quickly.

Housework? Phooey. I try to take frequent breaks from the keyboard. I try to force myself to a maximum of an hour per session; that's easy when I'm simming because Pes's awesome mod has an auto-save feature that I have set to every 60 minutes and leaves the game paused afterwards. That way, because saving takes some time, I go off and do something, like laundry or unload the dishwasher (ugh! can't say how much, or why I so hate doing that!). I often surprise myself by how much I get done ... and how much time I spend doing it. Once I move a piece of clutter it shows up something else and before I know it, half an hour has gone and an amazing amount has been done. It's nice to come back to the puter with a clear conscience.