September 2004 Archives

Giselle's school is doing one of the "help support the school by selling candy, candles, and magazine subscription" drives. And of course, she's all excited about what little plastic prizes she could get if she sells x number of things. I want to help the school, and I want her to be excited about helpful activities, but selling boxes of froofroo popcorn and subscriptions to Reader's Digest doesn't sit too easy with me. Of course it's not like the kids who come through the neighborhood a couple times a month selling peanut brittle and candy bars to help them on their way to some vacation camp in Stickerbush, New Mexico, so that they have something to do to keep them out of gangs and petty theft. Which pretty much seems like a low-grade protection racket to me. I guess by comparison, selling stuff that people don't want to help fund the school isn't as strange. So I'm going to bring the brochures to work and maybe get some sympathy.

We (mostly me) did some more telescoping this weekend. We drove up to Anderson Mesa Saturday night and got in some great dark sky gazing. It's a hilltop where Lowell has a satellite observatory set up that doesn't swim in city lights like the historic Lowell Observatory does. Giselle was bummed out because Amanda and Harrison were spotting all the shooting stars and she was missing them. Another two local amateur astronomers were there observing. Bill Ferris is the president of the Coconino Astronomical Society, and his cohort Brent were most helpful in pointing out various sights and constellation markers. He was using a 10" reflector that showed some really detailed views.

When I was first setting up the scope and getting things lined up, I started to notice the reeking smell of horse manure. It finally got so bad that I did a red-flashlight survey of the surroundings and found that I had parked the car such that both driver and passenger doors opened into huge piles of the stuff. Lovely. Well it was too late now. I just let Amanda and the kids know where they were and tried to make peace with the wafting odors.

There is a constellation that rides the Milky Way in the south sky called Sagittarius. It's supposed to represent an archer, but looks more like a teapot. This was the first time I had actually done a naked eye observation of it from a dark sky location. The amount of detail and richness of objects visible to the naked eye was really shocking to me. The beauty and staggering size and distance of the treasures up there really appeals to me. Although I can't truly capture how spectacular they are, I did work on some more photos. At first it was quaint and fun, with a pack of coyotes yapped high-pitched giggles at each other off in the distance, and the elk chiming in with their whale-like calls now and then. But it got a little hairy when a rustling noise sent me thrashing for my flashlight to find out that sure enough, a fluffy little skunk was headed my way. They don't shoo away easily, what with having the biochemical advantage and all, so I hid in the car at one point. I haven't developed the Grizzley Adams mentality just yet, and I'm really not sure I'm ready to see if I can live as one with the skunks of the wild. So anyway, on to the pictures...

This image is of the Milky Way along the constellation Cygnus. I didn't shoot through the telescope with this shot. I just attached the camera to the top of the scope so that the mount it sits on could rotate with the sky and allow a series of nice long exposures. You can see dark clouds of dust blocking some of the light from the Milky Way, as well as some red nebulae speckled in spots.

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This next image is of the constellation Orion. If you look in the belt region, you can see some of the nebulas Orion is famous for.

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This shot is of the Pleiades star cluster. I had a little trouble bringing out the blue nebula behind it without adding ugly halos around the stars.

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After shooting those 3, I moved to shooting through the telescope eyepiece. This is a portion of the Double Star Cluster in Perseus

And here is an much closer image of the M42 nebula in Orion:

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And here's Saturn:

Venus:

Mercury was a little harder to focus on especially as it was very close to the horizon and was getting smeared out by the thicker air:

The moon was a very cool sight through the telescope as it rose above the trees. It's hauntingly thin crescent had me imagining that the Nostromo should come cruising out of the brightening dawn and across the view. It was definitely a sci-fi view:

So that's it for now. Thankye for stopping by. Sorry I didn't have any really entertaining stories of my neuroses to tell this time (sancho).

Just you basic gripe here. Because you know you like it.

We have 3 credit cards. Three too many, we know. So we've been paying down the 2 easy ones at an accelerated pace. Last month, we were within a couple months of paying them both off, when bammo, one of them dished out a lump $59 membership fee. What the? I didn't remember that from previous years...maybe my memory stinks...wait, I know it stinks. But I still had that card pegged as a no-membership fee account. They probably sent a notice in miniscule 4 point type that I didn't read. Well whatever, that fee cinched it. That was targeted as the card we would sink first. A little disclaimer on the back of the bill said that the membership fee would be rescinded if we paid the remaining balance in full and closed the account within 30 days of the mailing of the bill. Hahah, I thought, I will pay it all off now, cancel the card, and have an extra $60 off my back.

So that's what I did. I paid that suckah off for every penny except for the $59 fee. I even did it online for extra quickness. And all well within the 30 day period I might add.

Then I tried to cancel the account.

For days.

Canceling your account is not meant to be easy, you see. First, you must go through numerous automated response & data request trees when you call the 800 number. When you finally stumble on the part where you can 'close your account', and you get excited...take a deep breath, because you're only halfway to first base bubba. The next automated pathway will eventually require you to enter 3 microsatellite base sequences from your 5th, 7th and 13th chromosomes (substituting the * key for adenine since cytosine resides on the 2 key also). And bummer days if you mess up any one of the digits you need to enter, because it will be easier to call back than to try and navigate back to where you messed up.

But once you do triumph over that gauntlet, you will find the funniest thing. They want to know why you're closing your account...is it because of the interest rate? Or is it because of the membership fee? Hmmm, somebody is in touch with the pulse of the public it seems. Because when you press 2 for 'membership fee', they offer to knock $10 off for you. Woo-flippiddy-hoo! Which leads to, 'Press 1 to cancel this action', 'press 2 to continue'. But there was no 'press 3 to bite me'.

So I pressed 2. And you know what? You are actually sent to a human being to verify the gravity of this choice you are making. Imagine that. An actual person. Except not. Because the 'why are you closing your account' department won't pick up the phone. For 2 days in a row. During business hours.

I was furious. I eventually managed to squeeze through the automation and talk to one of the regular CSR people. I can't for the life of me remember how on earth I did that, but I did. And I asked why I couldn't talk to somebody about closing my account, why why why??? "Because that office is located in Tampa, and they've been evacuated due to Hurricane Charley".

D'oh. Boy did I feel like a jerk. But I told them to put a note in my electronic file to show that I'm making an effort to close this thing before the 30 days are up.

So I gave it a couple more days, went through the phone gyrations again, and actually got to talk to a guy in the Close-your-account department. And it was so fun. I got to talk to him for 15 minutes about why I wanted to close the account, and how closing credit card accounts can hurt your credit score, and how no it won't because I've still got 2 other cards, and then how Capital One is going to buy another bank in a couple months or something, and then they hope to dissolve all membership fees. And on and on and on. Finally, he gave me the suit-yourself tone, and said he would close the account. He said, yes, everything is paid up.

Great. Scratch that off the list of back-monkeys.

Then a couple days ago, I get the Capital One statement in the mail. I'm a little bit excited as I open it, and hope to see a zero, and then a period, and then a couple more zeros in the account balance field. But no. Not only do I see $59.00. I see $59 plus interest. Aaaaarrrrrrrrrrrggghhhhh, I cried as I opened my arms to the angry heavens.

So this morning, I contorted myself into a pretzel shape, and dialed through all the various dialings it takes to get to a human being. Today, it seems, I got to speak to somebody in India. No probs. This is a dialect I can work with. We got to talking about why oh why is the membership fee still on there...and now there's interest on it too? Turns out that my handy helper from a couple weeks ago was wrong about the account being paid off. There was interest that had accrued in the days since the statement was mailed and I actually paid, and by the way, the member fee was going to accrue too, until such a time as all sloppy interest spatter is paid up. $2.03 oughta do it. So I went online and paid $5.00. Because I could just picture 1 or 2 cents accruing in the 30 minutes since we talked, and then I'm still not paid up. How do they figure people are going to be able to calculate this? They don't recalculate online or by telephone, except for once a month. So how do you figure on a day to day basis what needs to be paid off? I guess you're just forced to overpay by a safe margin. Sort of like The Price Is Right.

I can picture it now. I'll call on Monday to be sure everything is squared up and I'll get [Accent=Jakarta] "Oh but sir, when you paid $5.00, dat indicated good fait to start paying de membership fee and dat you wanted to re-open your account, so you will now have to pay de entire membership fee in full before closing de account...sir?...sir?...why are you making machine gun noises?" [/Accent]

I should probably relax with a beer or two before making that call.

Alright. That's enough of that yapping.