Eclipse - Book 3

Yup, the time-stamp on this post is correct. At least I'm done now and can get on with life. In addition to being pure (deeply addicting) fluff, I found the series to be an increasingly interesting, and increasingly disturbing commentary about young women's ideas of romance.

Is it really the dream of teenage girls to be, like Bella, so consumed by love as to want to sacrifice every personal aspect of themselves to their boyfriend? Edward is a vampire in more than one sense--he has consumed Bella's individuality and independent personhood. I say that's just another aspect of her humanity (which, literally, is next on the list of personal traits she plans to give up). As Renee observed, Bella has become Edward's satellite.

So what's the deal here? Do women really fantasize about losing themselves entirely in a dominant, perfect man? What could be more self-destructive in the most basic senses of the term than that? I don't find this romantic--I find it disturbing. Emotionally, I enjoyed these books. Intellectually, I am, you could say, frustrated.

New Moon - Book 2

I need more sleep.

Twilight - Book 1

Bella is annoyingly helpless. Edward is absurdly perfect. And still their story is deeply addicting and ridiculously compelling. Why? What's the deal here?

A Mid-Tuesday Night's Stargazing

Our time in the Bay Area has been especially hard on one of our hobbies: stargazing. In fact, possibly the worst place for looking up at the sky and seeing anything is exactly where we live. Our binoculars and cute little Dobsonian telescope are rendered next to useless by the bright lights of the city and the liberal use of streetlights in our neighborhood. (Though happily we were able to spot the exploding comet a few months back using the binos around the block.)

For months we've been thinking about going camping to escape our light polluted home and the surrounding metropolitan area, and we finally did so this last week. Our buddies Ed and Nicole wanted to try doing a Messier marathon, and March is the month for that, so we put a plan together to go to Lake Sonoma on Friday, March 7th.

Unfortunately (actually, fortunately), the weather forecast for Friday evening was mostly cloudy, so we very spontaneously moved the plan forward to Tuesday, March 4th. It worked out fantastically. I had to skip a class and a couple of seminars, but we had the entire campground to ourselves. The hills were beautiful and green, the sky was gorgeous and had very few clouds, and there was no pesky Moon. It was perfect.

As you can see above, Ellie helped set up the tent. Oddly, we've had it for over a year and this was the first time we'd used it. It's huge. We could have fit Ed and Nicole's smaller tent inside and still have had enough room to fit the three of us around it. (We decided against that option, though.)

The stargazing worked out really well. We spent too much time vainly trying to spot M76 and M74 (not trying for those again in the future!), but we were able to see surprisingly dim things (down to 10th magnitude in one case) with our 4 1/2" scope. The green laser pointer came in very handy. In addition to Messier objects, we saw satellites, meteors, Mars, and Saturn. Tragically, I succumbed to exhaustion around midnight, and Maile followed a couple hours later. Ed and Nicole were stalwarts, though: they stayed up until 5:30am and managed to see about 75 of the 110 Messier objects!

This was an extremely wonderful plan, and I am already very excited about doing it again next year. Next time I'll sleep more than three and a half hours the night before, and / or I'll come prepared with caffeinated beverages of some kind. :-)

Picasso

This video was my contribution to the ward variety show. As you can see, Ellie got a bit more screen time than the others. Editorial privilege, I say (and, I suppose, the fact that I just had more footage of her).