But other than that everything is good.
I took a trip today to Bays Mountain Park, since I had nothing better to do. I am, as I may have mentioned previously, staying at my aunt's this week taking care of her animals. There are two dogs, Ivee and Molly, and two cats, one who I call Squeaky (though his real name is Duke) on account of the fact that he literally sounds like a squeaky toy, and another one whose name is Daisy or something else that starts with D and is a typical cat name. Of all the pets I probably get along with her best, even if I can't remember her name. I feed them and, in the case of the dogs, play with them some and make sure they get let out of the house. The only bad part of the job so far is that they think I'm slacking if I get up at 8 am to let them out. I guess I'll add that to my list of reasons I don't want a dog. :-p
Unfortunately, I forgot to take my camera to Bays Mountain Park, but it's okay because I mostly did things that a camera likely would have been useless to chronicle. The park itself is at a higher elevation, as it's name might imply, than the house here. The mountains in this part of Appalachia are odd. I can't explain exactly how. On one hand, it appears to me that they are smaller, but also more abrupt, somehow more widely spaced or less sloping. At times you feel like you are huddling between the earth's breasts, and at times you can see around you for miles. It's a little disorienting, in all honesty. I'm used to the wide rivers and ancient, rounded mountains a little further north. Somehow it seems that the mountains in my part of Virginia have more regularity to them.
I went to the park because, as I discovered thanks to Yahoo!/Google, on Sundays the park does a sun observation using one of their telescopes. What I mean is, the park contains both an observatory and a planetarium, and from the observatory on Sunday from 3pm to 3:30 one can view a part of the surface of the sun. Which is, needless to say, awesome. They also do moon viewings on Saturdays during the winter months, when it gets darker earlier. I have heard there might be an observatory somewhere around Pulaski, or might have been, but I've never seen it or visited. It makes me curious.
After viewing the sun from two different devices, one of which showed me sunspots, the other those filaments that spring from the sun sort of like the fila of an amoeba - these are apparently caused by kinks in the sun's magnetic field, which are in turn caused by the differing speeds of the surface rotation of the star, caused by the spherical shape of the celestial body, which makes me ponder the possibility of similar but less flashy occurrences in Earth's atmosphere - I wandered down to the planetarium to watch a showing there. It was my first time in a planetarium - it doesn't remotely compare to the night sky, but it is certainly interesting. The program was on IBEX which stands for something along the lines of "Interstellar Boundary Explorer." Some of the images were really fascinating, and the explanation proffered concerning the project made me ponder the concept of halos for a long time. See, IBEX was designed to measure, essentially, the solar radiation, or solar winds, which protect the planet and everything in our solar system. Unfortunately, the particles which make up the solar wind are invisible to the human eye, but you might get the idea if I described it as the sun's glow wrapping over everything and embracing it somehow. At least that was how I felt about the phenomenon.
In any case, I was all unawares but apparently the planetarium itself is considered one of the best in the Southeast, and cost some million dollars to construct (I'm not sure what cost a million bucks, but I would hypothesize it was probably mostly the projection equipment, followed by the fact that they would have had to reconstruct part of the building during the remodeling without affecting the surrounding construction). My curiosity ignited, I now find myself wanting to return to DC and see a show there and compare. I think I would like a show about finding constellations the best though.
Now that I'm back and the pets are fed, I find myself preoccupied with what I may be missing in my own locale. Probably not anything that grand or celestial, but perhaps there are things I've somehow missed at home that would be worth leaving the river bank (which I miss terribly, though I'm aware I have no right to as I hardly spend as much time there as I could). Still, I'm sure there's much more to explore here. And I'm so glad to be traveling again, even if it is just to the edge of Tennessee.
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