so becca tells me this morning that ikea is adding 300,000 square feet to their houston store. ah. i am in heaven. i love ikea. in stockholm, there is an ikea store that is 600,000 square feet. yet another reason to go to sweden. 🙂
well, mars has made its closest approach and is now receding from the earth again, but if you haven’t done it yet, you should go outside tonight and find it. mars is so obviously something closer than a star; it’s brilliantly orange these days. i can’t help but stare at it every evening and wish i had brought the telescope from home. my grandmother gave my family a telescope years ago, and for a while it sat in my parents’ room with a blanket over it. i used to take it out in the backyard occasionally to look at the moon, and i vaguely remember dad setting it up to look at jupiter once. but now it’s in the box in the attic, i think. maybe i’ll snag it when i’m home for christmas.
it always makes me feel good to see stories about things like this in the news. combined with the release of the columbia accident report, space is all over the place, and though much of the coverage of nasa is bad, a part of me still thinks that any coverage is better than none. but the mars stuff makes me happy. astronomy so often gets completely ignored by the media; it’s nice to see them making the public away that there are other worlds than these.
i skipped out on volleyball last night citing a swollen ankle. it’s still swollen today, and i’m starting to worry, as i’ve never had anything stay swollen for this long. but george the amateur doctor tells me it’s ok, and to just keep icing it. it was hurting more last night after i finished moving all my stuff from the old apartment (no comments from the peanut gallery on the irony of skipping volleyball, and yet still moving stuff up and down stairs), but this morning it seems to be a little less swollen. i am starting to be able to see my ankle bone again.
as of 8:00 last night, i am completely moved out of my old apartment. i took the last couple loads over to the new place, then went back to vacuum the floor and wipe down the counters. i pulled all the nails out of the wall, took down the hooks i’d put up, and took down the ceiling fan lights i’d bought.
i took one last look around, and said “goodbye 803. i hope someone else enjoys you as much as i did.” then i walked downstairs and locked the door.
my new apartment is nice. extremely cluttered at the moment, as i haven’t finished unpacking, but nice. i’m impatiently waiting for the dsl to come on (which apparently can take up to 10 days from the time they turn the phone line on, which i don’t really understand but it seems like they should be able to do it faster). and i can’t figure out how to reconnect my ceiling fan lights, despite having observed how they were connected in the old place. sigh.
time to ice my ankle.
