Category: Bay area, Calif.

Transit of Venus

I’m taking a break from work here at the Palo Alto church, and watching the transit of Venus. I’m projecting an image of the sun using a pair of 7×25 binoculars mounted to a tripod. I have a white card set up about six feet from the binoculars, resulting in an image that’s approximately five and three quarters of an inch in diameter. The optics in the binoculars are not particularly good, and there’s enough chromatic aberration that I don’t get a particularly crisp image. Nevertheless, I can clearly see the shadow Venus is casting as it crosses the sun; on this projection, it’s approximately three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter, and at this time about one and three sixteenths inches from the nearest edge of the sun. The card I’m projecting the image on is eight and a half by eleven inches oriented horizontally; the earth moves such that I have to readjust the binoculars every sixty or seventy seconds in order to keep a complete image on the card.

Venus does not appear to be moving in relation to the sun. I suppose if I sat out here long enough, I’d be able to see some relative motion; but the transit is going to take four hours, and I don’t suppose I can take that much time away from work.

And yes, the transit is a pretty amazing phenomenon to watch, even with my crude projection device.

Corrected per Erp’s comment.

Crash

Last night, Carol and I were out for our nightly walk. We were talking about the various challenges and problems of the day, when we heard a crash behind us. We both spun around, and saw something had happened two or three blocks back along San Mateo Drive.

“Dan!” said Carol. “Do you have your cell phone? you better call 911.”

It looked like a motorcycle had crashed. It looked bad, but I was reluctant to call 911, only to have them get mad at me because it was only a fender bender. We started jogging towards the crash; I punched “911” into my phone and was ready to hit the send button; but before we had gone a block, we could see that a police car had already arrived at the site.

By the time we got to the crash site, we could see a cop standing over someone lying on the sidewalk, shining a flashlight on whoever it was. Her police car was parked so as to block two and a half of the four lanes of San Mateo Drive. The motorcycle was lying on its side a hundred feet down the road from where the person was lying, and pieces of it were scattered across the roadway. Then it looked to me like the cop stood up suddenly and took a step back.

Soon, another police car arrived and parked next to the first police car, and the first cop moved her car and parked it across the other end of the block. Then two more police cars arrived. We started walking away, wondering why there were so many police cars coming. I called out to the first cop as we walked by, “We heard the crash but we didn’t see anything”; and Carol added, “But there were no other cars.” The cop, in a shaken voice, replied, “No, it was a solo.”

As we walked home, we talked about what we had seen. Why had that cop arrived at the scene so soon? Had she been chasing the motorcycle? It looked like they were treating it as a crime scene; was the motorcyclist dead? Two fire engines went down San Mateo Drive towards the crash; then another police car; then, at long last, an ambulance. We had completely stopped talking about the various problems and challenges of the day; the crash had put things into a different perspective.

There was nothing in the news about the crash. Tonight, we walked by the crash scene, but we couldn’t see anything. We’ll probably never know what really happened.

Cell phone

“What happened to your phone?” said the saleswoman sympathetically. She was holding my cell phone between her thumb and forefinger, because it was dripping wet.

“It went into the laundry,” I said.

“Oh, your poor phone,” she said. “I’m going to turn it off so it will stop vibrating.” It wouldn’t turn off, so she took the battery out.

She got me a new phone, but had difficulties with the computer. The other salesman came over to hep her out. He looked at the phone. “What happened to your phone?” he said sympathetically.

“I was doing laundry,” I said. “Then I was like, Where’s my phone? It was in my pants. I opened the washing machine, it was full of water and going goosh, goosh, goosh; I reached in to my pants pocket, and there was my phone — bzzzt — vibrating continuously and totally dead.” I had them both laughing.

I asked the man if they were on commission, and he said they were. I apologized that they weren’t going to make much of a commission off my new phone. He said it was OK. I admitted that I used to be in sales. We got to talking about commissions, building relationships, meeting targets, all the things that salespeople talk about. Both these salespeople obviously followed the soft-sell school of sales. I like soft-sell salespeople: they’re easy-going, they have good people skills, they’re relentlessly positive, and they like to talk.

While we were talking, the man walked the woman through the process of updating my account. When we were done, I asked her if she was new. She said she was. “You’ll do great,” I said, “you have a good sales personality.” And I wasn’t just being an upbeat optimistic positive salesperson: she will be a good salesperson. We all said goodbye, and I walked out into the sunshine with my new phone.

220th birthday

Here’s to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights, is celebrating its 220th anniversary today. The senior minister here at our church, Amy Zucker Morgenstern, went to a vigil in Palo Alto to celebrate the birthday and protest rising threats to the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

I was not able to go to that vigil, but Hershey, a member of the Palo Alto church, sent me an account of something a UMC minister went through while participating in the West Coast Port Shutdown on Monday in Seattle — this minister’s account, with free speech, religion, and an attempt to keep a public assembly peaceable, seems quite relevant to today’s birthday celebration.

Rain

Yesterday, I noticed that the Swiss chard and dandelion greens we had planted in the garden were wilting again. The soil was almost as dry as it gets in the summer time. I brought out a bucket of salvaged gray water, and gave them a long drink. Even though the rainy season has begun, the weather forecast for the next five days calls for sunny dry weather, so it looks like I’ll be doing more watering in the garden in the week ahead.

Just a sweatshirt

Early this evening, Carol and I were discussing how Penn State fired football coach Joe Paterna, because he didn’t report credible allegations of child abuse to the police.

Then we decided to go for a walk. It was a little bit chilly out. Carol went to get her sweatshirt, which just happens to say “Penn State” on it. “I wonder if I should wear it?” she said. We decided that probably no one would notice.

We had been walking for a quarter of an hour when a car drove by and someone yelled something out the window. We couldn’t figure out if they were yelling at us. There were no other pedestrians in sight. But we couldn’t think of anyone who knows us who would yell out the window at us if they drove by. “I wonder if it’s the sweatshirt,” Carol said.

After half an hour, we got to the business district at Burlingame Avenue. There were quite a few people walking on the sidewalks. Suddenly Carol stopped. “I can’t tell if they’re looking at me or not,” she said, and took off the sweatshirt, and tied it around her waist.