Alright, clearly I'm in the wrong field of work. Carrie, the mother of Stew's goddaughter, is a trained shiatsu massage therapist. She's been job searching for not very long and today she was offered three, count them, THREE different jobs. She's going to one other interview this evening, but she's already been hired on with the Marriott Hotels. Dang. On the other hand, I'm going to design her business cards and I'm being paid in a one-hour session. Dang !

Mars is up these days, looking pretty fantastic and being closer than it has been in 60,000 years, or somesuch. It's visible in the west before dawn, so the plan is to stay up tonight (rather than get up really early) and then go look either out the window (which might suck) or hop into Scarlette and drive north for about half an hour to see it in darker skies. Rick will be over tonight, but since I've got work to do, I probably can't go to bed early anyway. If we decide for the second option, maybe he'll want to come along for the ride, despite the early start to his day, I don't know, but I'll ask him tonight. I wish I had not left my binoculars at the cottage. If I had a tripod, I could take a photo, maybe, but I don't.

This also reminds me that it is coming up on the summer meteor season. From about July 22nd to near the end of August there will be lots of fun meteor activity in the sky. Of course, the big show is the Perseids which peaks around August 12. Hopefully, I will be at my cottage where there will be very little light interference from urban centres. Hooray for cottages in the Laurentiens ! Anyway, I just spent the last forty minutes or so teaching Sierra (the goddaughter) about meteors and then meteorites, showing her classic car-crushing photos, and then about the craters on the moon. All this was put down on paper by me (showing Sierra what makes a meteor shower happen) and then her drawing renditions of pictures we found on the internet. At one point she said, "Wow, Maya, you know a lot," and that made me smile.

I could make school fun, except I wouldn't want to stick with the curriculum, but I bet that if I were a teacher, kids would like me. From the crater pictures we moved into some geography because I was explaining about how the dinosaurs became extinct. I asked her if she knew how and she said, "Um, volcanoes?" and I said, "Well, that was part of it, you're right. But what were we just talking about?" She said, "Meteors?" And so I said, "Yup. One really big one hit Earth and threw a lot of dust into the air and scientists think they found it in Mexico." Sierra got excited, "Where is Mexico? We have a friend there !" So, I pulled out my atlas and showed her where we are and where Mexico is. Then we went and husked some corn.

It's been a nice day.