Current

It's been a week. I've been really tired and so has Dick. We're getting our selves together, though.

Work (or looking for work in my case) has been on hold for awhile, but now it's safe to put some energy into it. I just sent my resume and letters to a couple of my science friends; maybe they have a project for me or can pass my info onto one of their colleagues. Dick is gearing up for sales in Denver; he's getting his enthusiasm back.

I sure hope I can find a way of making an income; it feels very strange not to be bringing any money into the household. Not only that, but I need to put up a pasture fence and take care of other horse requirements.

I keep running into a neighbor at the WalMart. We got to talking a month ago - her daughter has a telescope, but they couldn't see anything with it. Tonight I went out and took a look. It's a nice beginner's 'scope, but there was some assembly required. If you don't quite know how it works, it's easy to miss things. I ended up removing the primary mirror (it's a reflector scope) and re-attaching it. Turns out the owners did the same thing. So between us, we really screwed up the focus. But I did manage to see a star - not nice and round - it was a real skinny crescent. But we verified the light path, and the booklet seems to have good directions on collimation so we decided to call it a night. The neighbor will try the collimation steps over the weekend, and then we'll touch base and maybe I'll see if I can mess it up next week sometime. After that, we can align the finder-scope. Then, we get to install the software. This baby has a drive! It should be fun to get it going and I think it will be really good for planets and clusters.