Month: July 2004

Is it August yet?

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 4 Comments

My Chicago Gathering pics are up! I’ve also added them to the Existential Scoobies site along with the ones ann1962 already gratiously supplied (look for the ones with the .jpg suffix).

I’m a bit befuddled this week, trying to recover from my whirl-wind vacation to Chicago, Lincoln, and Denver. I have a mazillion things to do, and I don’t want to do any of them because I’m tired. I keep saying, “Eh, I’ll do that when I get back from Santa Cruz”, where I’m going camping this weekend. Four days of sun, hiking, bookstore shopping, and NO internet access.

I may go into severe jittery mania without internet access.

Anyway, it’s amazing what you can do when you’re trying to procrastinate something else. I need to clean my condo in a major way because the masqMom is going to be spending a few nights here next week, and I need to do the laundry from Chic-Denver, and there’s yet more packing to do and suddenly, I’m highly motivated to write copious posts at the community and I even started that essay on Connor and Personal Identity for ros_fod‘s site.

Anyway, don’t expect a peep from me from Saturday through Tuesday afternoon.

Stop and smell the planets

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 3 Comments

You know, there was a time when I used to get excited about every space shuttle launching, every space probe whizzing past planets, every eclipse. I remember one summer in grad school I was working for the State of CA and there was a partial eclipse that day and I made a point of going out on the office patio and squinting up at the sun just to see if I could see the little bite the moon had taken out of it.

I remember walking out to the patio, passing all the worker bees in their Dilbert cubes thinking, “This is a major event! Look at you people, so intent in your work like that’s somehow of any importance at all compared to this!” Uninspired drones.

And then somewhere along the way, I stopped paying attention to any of that stuff, too. Maybe it just became so commonplace. Maybe the opposite–maybe there wasn’t enough exciting astronomical events out there and I gave up hoping for it. Or maybe it’s just, in the past few years, I’ve been less into the sci-fi and wanting to see it become real, and more into the fantasy/horror genres. Who knows?

Lately, though, there has been a flurry of new!fun!space news. Privately funded space ships. Probes whizzing past Saturn’s rings. I may yet become again the girl who stayed up all night watching the latest fuzzy images of the planet Neptune.

Oh and that meme thing…. which says I’m apparently a wimp lurking in the shadows.

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