Category: Diary (Page 24 of 38)

I’ve known James and Sue since university days. Several years ago they left New Zealand to spend some time in England. In fact, Mitchell (whom regular readers of my verbiage will be familiar) who was boarding with J&S ended up staying with us in Browns Bay, Auckland, for a few months before independently moving to England himself. Well, Mitchell’s still there, but James and Sue are moving back “home” to New Zealand, and stopping by some old friends on the way, including Washington, Vegas, and San Francisco in their itinerary.

I think I officially took Monday off from work, as for some screwy reason I had more days off owing to me than I could actually take before the end of the year, but as luck would have it, I think some work issues came up and I didn’t get as much music done as I wanted to – or whatever it was I was planning to do that day.

That evening we picked James & Sue up at the airport. They were a little jet lagged, but had enjoyed their day in Washington.

I can’t remember what we did for dinner that evening.

We decided that given that James & Sue only had a couple of days with us, we would limit our sightseeing plans to two outings. 1) we’d take them to Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area; and 2) we’d visit some casinos on the Strip. After some discussion, we decided to do the natural scenery first.

We finally went and checked out this restaurant/brewery that we’d first noticed while trying to find our “local” Post Office on Tenaya Way. I say “local” in inverted commas because it’s miles away from our house. Hardly local.

Anyway, Tenaya Creek Restaurant and Brewery is just up the road from the Post Office and after passing it a couple of times recently, we dropped in and checked it out. It wasn’t very busy and now I can’t remember exactly what time it was when we arrived – around 5:00 I think as the sun has just gone down or was in the process of doing so – and the menu looked pretty varied and interesting. If I remember correctly, I had a chicken and mushroom pasta dish, and Lisa ordered a steak. The food was excellent. I was pleasantly surprised at the bang for the buck in the food quality department. The beer was good too.

From a price point, this is not going to be a regular Friday night eating out location for us, but it certainly won’t have to wait until our next “anniversary” either. We debated taking Derek and Teresa there when they arrived later in the month, but as it turned out our week was pretty full and it didn’t happen.

I’m looking forward to going back there.

Here’s a pretty good review of the place, albeit from the perspective of a brewpub aficionado: http://celebrator.com/200002/tanaya.html.

As a frequent peruser of Sky And Telescope’s web page, I was well aware of the upcoming Leonid meteor shower somewhat in advance of the local news media. We had tentative plans to spend the night of Saturday 17 in a cabin on Mt Charleston, hoping to enhance the experience by avoiding the light pollution of the Las Vegas Valley.

After the recent cat adventures, though, neither of us felt like we deserved to treat ourselves to a cabin-in-the-woods experience, and anyway, we had a Plan B that was actually a much better idea than the original plan. We would connect up with whatever the Las Vegas Astronomical Society was doing.

After some research on the Internet (see http://www.ccsn.nevada.edu/LVAS/) and some hasty emailing, we determined that, yes, the Society was meeting this weekend at one of their observing locations: Echo Bay.

The map online seemed to match up with the map in our little Nevada tourist guide book, which was a good sign. The observation site that the Society uses is located on a nearby airfield, but Echo Bay itself is a resort on the shore of Lake Mead. After a quick phone call, we verified that, yes, we could get dinner there if we arrived before 9:00pm. Plan B was sounding better and better.

After spending the afternoon shopping in town, we packed the ‘scope in the back of the car and tossed in a blanket, dressed up warmly, and set off to put some gas in the car before driving out of the valley.

A Nasty Shock

We drove down Decator Blvd and I got in the right-hand lane looking for the corner gas station entryway, came upon it quicker than I expected and started to make the turn. I heard a horrible screetch of brakes behind me and with a bit of a panic, I straightened out of the turn and slowed, pulling over to the side of the road. Looking back I saw a huge SUV which has somehow been on the *right* side of me and had obviously not expected me to turn. They had had to stop suddently and had turned into the curb. Ugh! How had I let that happen? I was *sure* that I had been in the Right-most lane. Yet somehow, we had almost had a nasty accident. I saw the other driver’s arms waving in frustration. I waited a couple of seconds to make sure no-one was hurt, decided they were ok, and seeing that neither of us had actually hit anything (or each other’s vehicles), I pulled out from the curb, turned the corner, and turned into the other entrance to the gas station. I think I made it clear that I wasn’t running away, but just getting off the road and being pretty obvious about it. If they’d wanted to follow me and have a conversation about the incident, they could have done so. But they didn’t, for which I was relieved to say the least.

(I am quite honest about the fact that I was deficient in that I had not indicated the turn in sufficient advance of doing so, but I couldn’t explain how I had suddenly been one lane over from where I expected to be. Naturally, the next time we drove down the same stretch of Decator Blvd, I took some extra time to examine the layout of the road. It turns out that just before the entryway, the road widens to the right and an extra lane appears ready for the right-turn-only lane at the intersection. So, even though you are in the right-most lane on the approach, you do have to indicate a lane-change right before making the turn into the gas station. The SUV was obviously familiar with the road, and assuming that I was going straight ahead, must have zipped in behind me just as the new right lane appeared. So I don’t feel entirely to blame for the near miss, although you can bet I’ll look more carefully and indicate sooner in similar situations in the future…)

We stop for backup dinner

After filling up with gas, we head for the Eastern mountains, and Lisa checks the map and observes that our destination may be a little further away than we thought. The map said 50 miles from some junction; I’d looked at the map and done a ball-park estimate of 1 hour travel time, but as usual I’d neglected to take into account the time it takes to get to the Las Vegas city limit. We did some mental math and decided that in case it took us longer than we thought to get out to Echo Bay, we should take 10 minutes and stop for juice and sandwiches so that worst case, we’d have something to eat and drink.

It was just as well we stopped at that point, because were almost at the Great Unconformity – and we knew that beyond that there was no place to eat until Echo Bay Resort.

As it turned out, the road was in pretty good condition and even though it was very dark and we were driving in unfamiliar territory, we made good time and arrived at the Echo Bay Resort at about 8:20pm. Plenty of time for a burger and coffee at the restaurant. Lisa was sensible and had the presence of mind to ask the waitress to fill our thermos flask full of fresh hot coffee.

There were plenty of grizzled, grey-haired astronomer types getting “warmed up” in the bar, but we decided to head straight out to the airfield. Even though it was only 9:30 and the predicted Leonid window was 12:30 – 3:00am, I wanted to get out there and park the car, set up the ‘scope and meet some members of the Las Vegas Astronomy Society.

The drive took us back towards the main road, but before you get there, you take a sharp left turn on to a metalled road which appears to vanish into blackness. For about 10 minutes we drove slowly around humps and turns and ruts, trying to penetrate the pitch blackness outside of the glow of our headlights. It occurs to me know that if I had been able to turn off the headlights, we would have actually seen where we were going, by starlight alone. However, our Toyota Carolla has a safety feature in that even if you turn the headlights off, a darkness sensor turns them on again. I was painfully aware that any astronomer types who had arrived previously and had acheived “night-vision” would be cursing our bright lights as we approached the airfield.

After some dead-ends and retracing our path, we found a wide open area that had to be the airfield. There were a couple of wide strips of blacktop that were presumably the landing zone and taxi lanes, and up one end there was a group of cars with people standing around.

We drove up and parked in an empty space.

Checking out some heavenly bodies

Out of the car it was pretty chilly, but not too bad. I was wearing two layers under my leather jacket and I felt the cold most on the top of my head, predictably. Should’ve gone back for a hat after all.

The sky was awesome.

We could see the milky way overhead, it was hard to pick out the constellations because the background stars were so much brighter than usual. There was a glow behind the mountains in the West from the Vegas Valley – you could still see the vertical beam of the light on top of the Luxor Pyramid but only just. There was another glow from Echo Bay but again, it didn’t distract from the fantastic view of the heavens. I’d never seen it like this, not even in Marin or Auckland, for that matter.

Even if no meteors showed up, I thought, it was going to be worth it just for this.

Every now and then another car would drive up the gravel road and turn onto the airfield and everyone would yell out for them to shut their lights off.

We took a walk up and down the array of cars, admiring the various telescopes and reclined sky viewing arrangements. There were some camper trailers and quite a few children running around.

I set up our 6″ Dobsonian ‘scope and checked out its spotter scope – it seemed to be still aligned correctly after our bumpy ride. A quick check of Jupiter and Saturn, both high in the sky, looking great.

After that, some more challenging targets: The Orion nebula! Finally I get to see it with my own eyes. Somewhat disappointingly, you don’t get to see the colours that you do in photographs. It appears in shades of grey. But it’s still pretty cool.

Next up: The Andromeda Galaxy. This one isn’t really visible from the Southern Hemisphere, and I had never actually managed to track it down before, but in this gloriously bright sky, you could see it as a naked eye object, about half the width of the full moon: a faint oval smudge. In the telescope it resolved to: a faint oval smudge. (Well, you can see a globular center, but no spiral arms or dust lanes like the multi-minute exposures you see in books and stuff.)

It was starting to get cold. I don’t think the temperature dropped, but I was starting to feel it. I wrapped myself in the blanket and Lisa retired to the car for a bit.

The folding deck chairs were a good idea, but I couldn’t stay still there for too long before having to get up and walk around to keep warm.

During this time we’d see the odd “regular” shooting star, and the occasional Leonid meteor. At around half past midnight we definitely started seeing more of them, radiating up from the Eastern horizon, where the constellation Leo had yet to rise. The Leonids are so-called because the point at which the Earth’s orbit intersects the orbit of the 33-year periodic Tempel-Tuttle comet appears to be in the constellation Leo. The meteors are literally space-dust left behind by the comet, impacting the Earth’s atmosphere at a relative speed of 70 km/sec. Yeah – they burn up pretty good.

Interestingly, looking towards the West (opposite where Leo was rising) resulted in a goodly number of sightings, only instead of radiating away from a point on the horizon, they were direct down towards a point on the opposite horizon. (This is an apparent optical illusion that happens as a result of us living on a sphere.)

Invasion of the Lenoids

About 1:00am the constellation Leo was climbing into the Eastern sky, and the meteor rate seemed to pick up a bit. They didn’t get brighter or larger, but more frequent. Instead of one every 10 seconds, we started to see 2 or 3 in quick succession, every 10 seconds or so. Some of them were very bright, leaving a trail that lingered in the sky, fading from bright white through yellow to green. Freaky.

The best picture I’ve seen online that most closely resembles what we saw that evening is here: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap011123.html.

There was one older guy sitting behind me who continued to mispronounce “Leonid”, saying things like, “Whoa, look at that! That was definitely a Lenoid!”

Just past 2:00am I was having trouble staying warm enough, even with frequent retreats to the car and sips of coffee from the thermos. We decided we’d seen enough, even though the “invasion” was still happening. We apologised in advance for the sudden brightness of the car headlights, and quickly drove back down the dirt road back to the highway, turned South-West and headed back to the Vegas Valley. We continued to see bright meteors burn out ahead of us in the sky, even above the glow of the headlights. We’d pass other cars pulled over to the side of the road, with people sitting on them staring at the sky.

Even after we’d crossed the mountains and were driving back towards home in the light-polluted valley, we continued to see the odd Leonid meteor.

Even though the meteor rate had not approached that required to achieve the the coveted “hyperspace” effect, it was still a truly awesome experience. I am very happy to have been living in one of the regions of the globe where the Leonid shower was visible.

Not the Spacey movie, but improvisational theatre. Back in Auckland, New Zealand, I used to frequent a comedy improv thing called “Scared Scriptless”, and before that a more structured team-oriented one called “Theatresports”. Rather like “Whose Line Is It Anyway” if you’re familiar with that show.

We saw a review of “The Usual Suspects” in the local paper, noted the time and venue – 8pm, Nov 16 – and decided to give this a try. The Community College of Southern Nevada sounded like a place we needed to check out for interesting events and activities anyway.

The show was very much like Scared Scriptless – a small, amateurish college theater, minimal-to-non-existent scenery, just three actors and an audience willing to suggest themes and one-liners. It was very enjoyable. They have another show coming up on Dec 7, and we’re wondering whether to take James and Sue when they visit (from UK on their way back to NZ) in a couple of week’s time. In fact, I’m fairly sure it was James who first introduced me to Theatresports.

This month was not so good for the cats. Kami stayed in one place long enough for me to observe a parasitical worm in her eye, which forced us to locate a decent vet. As it turned out, the one we see from the freeway as we drive South down 95 is called Creature Comforts, and it is very pleasent.

We took them both in to get their shots up to date and synchronised, and after we’d held Kami down and observed the vet remove the worm with a pair of tweezers, she went out the back to the microscope and looked it up in her parasitology textbook to find out what it was. It seems that it was a worm that lives in horses; she supposed that a fly had acted as an intermediary. Yick.

After a brief checkup, Karma was found to have an infected tooth. He has had one fang on the point of falling out for a number of years, but apparently rather than drop out naturally it had decided to stick around and fight it out. We hadn’t noticed Karms being uncomfortable, but this must have been giving him some pain for some time, and it was best to have it surgically removed. The following day we took him in, left him with the vet and when we picked him up that afternoon he was groggy, drooling, and had a bald patch on his forearm where the IV had gone in.

Update: About a week later, Karma is relatively complacent about taking his twice-daily pill of antibiotics, and seems to be improving in his appetites for food.

Reading the local paper can pay off in unexpected ways. One week this little article popped up in the “Living” section: “Geological Site sheds light on Las Vegas Valley’s Past”.

It turns out that there is something in geological circles known as the Great Unconformity. I’ll let hydrogeologist Nick Saines (http://members.aol.com/saines1/Unconf.html) describe it: “The Great Unconformity is the contact between the Precambrian and the Cambrian – a gap of 1.2 billion years – one fourth of the age of the Earth. It is not just the time missing that makes the Great Unconformity great; after all, Precambrian granite overlain by Recent alluvium or dune sand has a greater time gap. No, the Great Unconformity, as named by one of my heroes – Major John Wesley Powell – in 1869, is the contact between the Primeval World (when life was mostly single-celled creatures), and the world in which the continents and the life upon them really began to evolve.”

Pretty cool stuff. It turns out, this unique geological feature can be seen in only a few places. One of them is at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Another is 100 yards off Lake Mead Boulevard.

It seems that the mountains at one side of the Las Vegas Valley were created through an interesting process that results in the exposure of this very early portion of strata.

After reading this article, I suggested to Lisa that we drive out there and take a look at it. It’s not every day you get to put your finger on the Great Unconformity.

So we did, and afterwards we walked to the top of the hill and got a good view of the Las Vegas Valley.

With the downturn in the tourist business here in Las Vegas, since September 11, many local shows have been running special “two-fer” prices for local residents during October. One of these was the Blue Man Group show at the Luxor. What you do is show your Nevada driving license as proof of residency, and you can get two tickets for the price of one. Normally the big casino shows are out of our casual price range, but the two-fer offer for the Blue Man Group was too good to pass up.

We managed to get lucky and get tickets for Wednesday, the same day as an invitation to lunch in Town from the Harvard Club of Nevada. Lunch with the Harvard Club is not the sort of thing that would normally appear in our appointment reminder book, but as parents of a Harvard student, the opportunity to meet similar people and possibly “network” with them seemed like an opportunity to be taken advantage of.

So we took Wednesday afternoon off from work, changed into slacks instead of our usual jeans, and spent the rest of the day in the city.

The lunch was business-like but not very formal, and we did meet some interesting people and also agreed to act as official HC representatives for a 2 hour shift at the local upcoming college fair.

After lunch we parked the car in the Luxor parking lot, and picked up our tickets for the Blue Man Group show, then decided to spend the rest of the afternoon walking up and down the ‘Strip. The objective: To have coffee and a croussant at a cafe in the “Paris” Casino.

The casinos on the Strip are further apart than they look.  Also, the Sun was hotter than we expected. So consequently, by the time we reached Paris we were really looking forward to that coffee.

Strangely, this was harder to find than we expected, but after some browsing in the faux la rue de cafe, we settled on ice-coffee and a crepe.

We wandered back to the Luxor via the Aladdin, which I think recently went bankrupt. It’s still open, but for how much longer? we wondered.

Blue Man Group

I saw my first Blue Man Group show in Boston a number of years ago. I still remember it vividly, and if anything it made me more keen to see the Vegas show.

If you’ve seen a Blue Man Group show, then you know what a challenge it is to describe one. If you haven’t, then to describe it in too much detail might take the edge off the child-like delight you experience when encountering the Blue Men for the first time. Perhaps the best thing to do is to suggest checking out http://www.blueman.com/feature/liveatluxor.shtml. 

For those not near a web browser, I will merely say that the three blue men (always there are three, with 6 accompanying fluorescent musicians) are child-like aliens who never speak but observe and reveal the fascinating world we live in through rhythm and optical illusions. My kind of brain food.

The show did not disappoint.

The kids have left, the house has been quiet for a week. Stan and Jeanne suggested we drive North up ’95 for 15 minutes and have breakfast at the lodge at Mt Charleston. This seemed like a good idea, so we agreed.

Apparently in Winter you can ski on real snow on Mt Charleston. At this time of year, however, the sun is hot, the breakfasts are good, and you can’t see the Vegas Valley unless you climb to the top. Which we didn’t do, but now we know where to go, we might do it some other time.

You have probably all read enough about the events of September 11, and therefore I don’t need to describe them here. Check the web. Look hard enough and you’ll find images and eyewitness accounts that they don’t play on television. This Century’s Hindenburg. Argh.

The first we heard about it was when Anna rang at around 7:30am to say not to worry, Josh was ok. Of course we had no clue what she was talking about. “Go turn on the TV to CNN,” she replied. We did, and we basically stayed glued to the set for the next few hours. Certainly nobody at work expected anything productive to get done that day.

Two days later as I write this and the sliding scale of relative misery has been altered for the foreseeable future. If I try to write about pleasant things I feel guilty, and if I write about unpleasant things I feel like I’m complaining about relative insignificance. Therefore, better not write about anything.

On a brighter note, as I write this I am sitting in the lounge listening to the new Yes album, _Magnification_, for the first time. There’s something about listening to music the first time – you can only do it once, for a start.

Yesterday evening I saw my first Black Widow spider.  Erk. She had decided to make her web in the left rear wheel hollow of our car, in the garage. After admiring her fine black body and red hour glass marking, I confess I persuaded her not to nest in the car by swotting her dead.

Now I’m a little more cautious venturing into the garage with bare feet.

Our house, as designed, has two central heating/airconditioning zones. One is supposed to be the living area, and the other the bedrooms. We threw a spanner in that design by insisting on using two bedrooms as daytime offices, but we could deal with that, providing the zones worked independently as advertised.

Unfortunately, the thermostat for the bedroom zone is located in the same room as the living area one – the living room. I kid you not. Apparently the builders don’t see a problem with this. In practice of course, the two zones are not independent, because the the bedroom thermostat thinks the temperature is whatever the living room thermostat is specifying. We can be sweltering in our offices while it’s cool in the living room, and freezing while the living room gets hot. The latter is more likely, because if we’re not in the living room during the day, we don’t want to waste energy cooling it down. So the bedroom thermostat works hard to cool off, and because it is not any near a bedroom vent, thinks it never succeeds.

For a while we put up with this while trying to convince the builder that it was a fault, or broke the building code, or something. Then we’d talk to the air-conditioning people, and they’d say “Hmm. This can’t be right. Let us talk to the builders about it, they should pay to have it moved.”

Of course, the only effect this had was to delay the whole process. The builder gets away with doing it because apparently the thermostat *is* within 10 feet of the bedroom zone intake vent (albeit through a door and round a corner!)

I will cut a long story short and say that this month, finally, the air-conditioning people came out and moved it for us, into the bedroom hallway. Now it is where it should be: directly under an intake vent for the zone it controls.

Of course, the seasons are changing and with them the range of temperatures our rooms experience, but we can already tell it has made a huge difference to our ability to control the temperature of the rooms. We like to set the max temperature pretty high (80) In order to maintain manageable electric bills and reduce the duty cycle of the air-conditioners. When they fire up it’s like a jet engine. And we have enough of those flying overhead as it is.