Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Lucinda had her first sleepover at a friend’s house last night. She said that she had fun, but not a lot of sleeping got done. I guess that’s just pretty normal for those sorts of things. So when she came home today, she ended up taking a nap with Mommy. But still, it’s a first for her, and it was a new adventure for all of us.

Today I put down the plywood flooring on the upper and lower platforms on the tower. I also built the two large “X” braces on the sides. Now the tower is very stable. I can stand on it and it doesn’t wobble at all. Ray mentioned that he thought that doing the concrete footings is hardcore. I wouldn’t think of doing something like this without them. Lucinda’s swing set is also anchored in concrete. When I was a kid, my Dad did concrete for my swing set, and it was like a rock. I remember going over to some other kid’s house to play and having his swing set topple over when we were playing on it. Of course I knew that would never happen with my swings. And so of course I decided that it should never happen to my kid’s swings, either. So I make concrete.

Next order of business is going to be the ladder to climb up to the top, and railings around the top platform. Then I will add the monkey bars.

Lucinda has been asking for a play house in the back yard. I told her that that would be too big of a project, but that I would build her a play structure with monkey bars. So I’ve been building. So far, I’ve got the basic tower erected. It’s anchored in the ground with concrete footings under the posts, so it’s pretty stable. I still need to do some more bracing on it for lateral stiffness. Then I will put in another set of concrete footings for the other end of the monkey bars. Then she will be able to play on it.

In some ways, this is kind of an insane project. But at the same time, I have fond memories of my father building insane things for me when I was little, and I want Lucinda to be able to think back on the same sorts of things when she grows up. So it’s off to Home Depot for me.

Today was the Spring Music Concert at Lucinda’s school. So I took a couple hours of vacation time to go over and see it. I rode my bike over there, which was a bit of an adventure, since the school is at the top of a big hill, but I made it all right. The kindergarteners sang “Going to the Zoo” and “John the Rabbit”. It was all very cute.

On the way back, since I had my camera, I stopped to snap a picture of a very weird palm tree in front of one of the houses near Caltech. I pass by it every day on my way to work, and it’s always a wonder.

The other day I happened on the web site for The Purpose-Driven Life. I’ve been hearing people talk glowingly about this book, and I was a bit curious. Also, Lucinda has been asking lately about whether I believe in God. So this is a timely issue in our house.

They have the first few chapters available online at the site.

Choice bits from the introduction:

Point to ponder: If there were no God, and everything was the result of random chance, there would be no purpose to your life.

I’ve truly never understood why people have a problem with this. There is no purpose to life, other than to reproduce. Why is this so hard for some people to swallow? I don’t understand this whole thing about ‘people have to have a purpose’. What’s wrong with that? Unless they’re thinking that it’s somehow like how “pigs don’t have a purpose”. Are they afraid that if they don’t have a purpose, the Boss is going to eat them? (“Dont’ get on that ship!… It’s a cookbook!”)

If there were no God, we would all be “accidents”, the result of astronomical random chance in the universe. You could stop reading this right now, because life would have no purpose or significance. There would be no right or wrong, no good or evil, and no hope beyond your brief years on earth.

This is another of those canards that I just don’t get. Sure, life has no purpose, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t right or wrong, good or evil. Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. You don’t need to invoke an imaginary God to establish this. I just don’t get it.

When I was a kid, to me, religion was like watching football. It was just something that other people did on Sunday. Religions just strike me as really quaint little superstitions. Maybe it’s a fun thing to think about, but it’s certainly not a basis for making major decisions. So that’s what I’ve been telling Lucinda when she asks me about God. I tell her it’s just a superstition, and that if she grows up and wants to believe in it, that’s her business. But I tell her not to automatically believe it’s true just because somebody else says it is.

Lucinda has been taking piano lessons for some time now, and she played in her first recital today. She was one of the youngest children there, but she did well. She played three short songs, and she said that she had fun. So that’s about the best we could hope for.

I took Lucinda to the JPL Open House today. We saw some exhibits about the history of the lab and space exploration. She liked the pictures of Jupiter, Saturn, and their moons, since we’ve seen them through our telescope.

The downside of it was that it was very hot and very crowded. Crowds are hard enough to deal with when you’re an adult. For a six-year-old, it’s even harder. Being less than four feet tall makes being in a crowd a trying experience. So we ended up not staying too long. Still, it was a fun time.

And one other funny thing we saw was a parking lot where not every space was marked ‘COMPACT’. What a novel thing…

It’s a warm and still night here in Pasadena, so I got out my telescope. Jupiter, Saturn, and the Moon are all up in the early evening right now. So Lucinda and I went outside and set up the telescope.

We had a look at Jupiter first. The air is very still tonight, so even though it’s a bit hazy, the seeing was quite good. I was able to run 200x and still get a good image. I was able to see the Great Red Spot, which crossed the meridian at 8:03 PDT.

Saturn was nice, too. It’s not completely dark, so I was only able to see three of its moons. But it’s still fun to look at.

The moon is a crescent, which allows for lots of nice shadows from the mountains and craters.

So, in the interest of making an experiment, I got my camera out. I don’t have a fancy camera, or even a way to actually attach it to the telescope. I just used some packing tape and taped it to the eyepiece. Then I set it on no-flash-night-mode and a 10-second timer. And here are the results. You can’t see the cloud bands or Red Spot on Jupiter, but you can see the four Galilean satellites. You can’t see any of Saturn’s moons. But the craters on the Moon came out pretty well.

Lucinda lost her second tooth tonight. She’s now lost both of the first two teeth she got back when she was 5 months old. She’s really quite pleased with all of this, and she’s been on the phone to Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Larry and so on to tell everyone about it.

Lucinda has been taking piano lessons for about a year now. All this time, she has been playing a little toy piano at home, but she’s been getting quite good at it. Recently when she was at ballet, she asked to play the grand piano they had there, and she sounded quite good. Since a real piano is out of our range, both in terms of money and space in the house, we got her a little Casio keyboard to practice on. It sounds pretty good, and the key feel is pretty close to a real piano, right down to the pressure sensitivity of the keys. So she’s having fun playing with it.