FTL

So Megan and I spent 3 lovely days relaxing at the holiday home of some friends on Camano Island. We basically just bummed around for 3 days, and I read Robert Jordan's The Great Hunt, which was fun. It's good writing, Mr. Jordan, but it's not quite *there* in the way that Orson Scott Card and Tolkien and Matthew Woodring Stover are *there*. But nearly.
I finished astronomy 100, Geology 101, and Psychology 206 and the quarter is over at SCCC. Yeah. So we get two weeks off, and then it's back to the grind again. Next quarter I'm doing Spanish 103 (easy!), Foundations of Pschological Research (potentially fascinating!) and Calculus 1 (yippee--finally, after all these years, I get to study calculus, which seems to be a sort of jumping off point for everything else in maths. I am really looking forward to the calculus!)
I finally figured out all the ins and outs of our new pellet stove, and it's very lovely and cozy and warm.
Eowyn called me last night at work crying and saying I hadn't sung the goodnite songs. So I went outside and sang to her over the cell phone. I felt very loved and powerful for good in her life. That was amazing.
I'm about 37% Christian today. a little over a 3rd, anyway. They were reading some Psalms (properly pronounced, according to me, "puh salms") at community group here last night, and I didn't find it very buyable. It seemed to me that whoever had written the psalm we were reading was either a little on the crazy side in terms of their positivity, or else they were just trying to convince themselves of all these excessively positive things. David, however, pointed out that part of the problem is that we are separated by millenia and all the language, culture, etc. that one could imagine, so that even attempting to read it, in translation, is excessively difficult. They just had a different experience and and different idea about things, and their psalms are so ... wrapped up in all these things with so many assumptions that we just don't get because we are here and now, and they were there and then. That helped me realize that it wasn't just me not getting it.
Has anyone seen any of the Hubble Deep Field images? Here's one: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/1996/01/. Amazing stuff. They take really long exposures (10 days) of tiny little sections of sky which are apparently empty, and what they get is this amazing image of hundreds and hundreds of galaxies right out to the edge of the visible universe--billions of light years away. It's just too wierd to think that the light we are seeing from these galaxies left these galaxies right back near the beginning of the universe, and it's taken all this time to reach us. What's more, when the light left these galaxies, they were a lot closer to us than they are now, since they been zooming away from us all this time. Maybe maybe maybe Einstein was wrong somehow, and FTL travel actually will be possible someday. That would be monga kewl.
More later.