After going out in the ministry Saturday morning (in which Harrison doused himself with half a bottle of orange juice at the Coffee Beanery) the kids & I went to see Astro Boy at the theater. I was a little surprised at the rather sudden weepy-pangs it gave me in places. I got buttons, and they knew how to push them apparently. Maybe some day I'll have to explore my Father-Son issues and do some sort of wretched emotional cleansing. We went to Chili's for really late lunch afterward, and before we got to the table, Harrison reached into his pocket, encountered a stowed pencil (point up), and stabbed himself under the fingernail. Yargh. Washing his hands didn't do much to distract the pain & he cried softly until the chips & salsa arrived. My poor little buddy is about as coordinated as I am.
I headed out to Sunset Crater last night at 12:30 am to work up a wide Milky Way sketch for the January AN issue. I sketched the star field from Canis Major to Auriga to the Pleiades and back down to Lepus from about 1:00 am to 3:30 am, and then spent the next hour working on the Milky Way itself. It was a beautiful night and the meteors were going mad--maybe 40-50 per hour. I'm not happy with the Milky Way part of the drawing though. I'm going to have to sneak another session in on Friday or Saturday morning between moonset and twilight. On such a broad scale, it was interesting to see how the dome of the sky didn't translate well to flat paper. Practicing cartographic projections in a sketch is pretty ridiculous, but that's apparently what you'd have to do if you wanted everything to come out according to plan on a sketch that covers 60 degrees of the sky.
So, 4 hours sleep, and I'm getting the familiar and disquieting buzzy feeling in my head. I just had a pretty hefty brain-spark a few minutes ago. Time for a little sleep catchup.
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