In the late 1980s I wrote some code doing assignments with the multi-fiber instrument Hydra. It clearly fell into the camp on the right in this xkcd. https://xkcd.com/2730/ It stopped working because I had put in a trap to exit if the date of planned observation was >=2000.

I did a naughty thing. It's been 5 months since I got the bivalent booster. Based on past data, one might expect that its powers should be waning. I'm traveling to Chile in a few weeks. So yesterday I asked the nice people at Safeway (who don't know me) for one. And here I am.

Whenever I submit a paper to the journals, I think of the line in Roger Zelazny's Isle of the Dead, of "casting jewels into the darkness." Maybe my papers aren't quite as impressive as creating new worlds, but I like 'em. This one I like quite a lot. But then I always do.

One problem we're up against: our backyard snow gauge only goes up to 30". Plus, our dogs heads can't be much higher than that. This could prove a problem eventually.

I got back from #AAS241, walked into the house, and found my spouse was virtually attending talks still. Weird!

Goodbye #AAS241! It was surprisingly fun, and if I'm still covid-free in a few days I'll feel it was well worth coming to the meeting. Got to meet a lot of new people, and hang out with a lot of old friends. Oh, and the talks and posters were good too!

If you're at the AAS and have nothing better to do this morning at 11:00, you can always come hear my talk on "Using the Red Supergiant Tail to Tell a Tale" in room 2B.

Early morning run throughs of my talk: it's all over the place in time, any where from 4:20 to 5:10. I mean, this is all close enough, but still. I might to heart something Arlo Gurthrie once quoted Pete Seeger about: "It never pays to over-rehearse."

So, how do you spot the astronomers on a flight? We're the ones wearing masks. There's at least 5 of us on this flight from Phoenx, and we are all wearing masks, and we seem to be about the only ones that are.