Remember: if you run out of small talk, you can always change the subject from the weather in your area to the weather ON MARS.

Here is the current weather on Mars:


The Mars Color Imager (MARCI) on the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter (MRO) images the whole planet of Mars once every day so that we can watch the weather. There is even a movie which shows roughly how the weather has been changing for the last couple of days.

You can see the northern polar ice cap, and all the other white parts are clouds, made up of water and CO2, sometimes with dust mixed in. These clouds can get quite thick, and they often settle around the tops of mountains, just like here on Earth. There have even been cyclones on Mars:

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You've never really experienced graduate school until your advisor puts his hands around your neck and physically throttles you.

Yeah, so I forgot to number my pages... big deal!

In other news, I was attacked by my cat this morning, and, uh... a bunch of my bffs are moving to Antarctica... I had to completely rearrange a 5-page single-spaced bibliography....

But all in all, it was a pretty good day. The first day of classes is tomorrow, so clearly things can only get better.

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Due to recent events, I have a few choice words for people who cheat on their spouses and significant others:
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

For the sake of the English language, I will henceforth refer to only "spouses" and use the English neuter "he" with the implicit awareness that it could be a significant other or spouse of either gender.

Let me make this clear:

You cheating on your spouse is your fault. It is always wrong. It isn't your spouse's fault for ignoring you or not "fulfilling your needs" or even being a jackass to you. Your spouse could be doing all of these things and none of them justifies cheating on him.

In fact, the activities and character of your spouse are completely independent variables that do not affect in the least the internal "Will I cheat?" equation.

Cheating or not cheating comes completely from within, completely from whether or not you have the fundamental integrity and self-respect not to engage in activities which are morally wrong.

If you think to yourself, "I can't cheat on him, because it would make him sad/angry" or perhaps, "I can't cheat on him, because it would hurt him too much," then you have the wrong state of mind. The internal dialogue should be, "I can't cheat on him, because I am not that kind of person." "I would never cheat on him, because I value my honor too greatly to dirty it by such a petty and morally reprehensible act." Otherwise, you will continue cheating on your partners, waiting for "The One" who will be so great that it will never even enter your mind to want someone else. There is no one that great. No one will ever be able to fill that space, especially since you will have been spending a great many months and years training your eye to see people outside your relationship instead of focusing on what you have.

So your spouse is a jackass. Perhaps he's even cheated on you! SO DUMP HIM ALREADY. If you can't keep your insane libido in check for as long as it takes to dump him, you have other more serious issues with self control.

This isn't targeted at anyone in particular, mind you, I have been planning to write it for the past several weeks after meeting some particularly disgusting examples of the human race for whom such activity is apparently commonplace. But if you see yourself in it, by all means be offended by it. Alternatively, you could grow a pair and do what is right.

In the manner of MoDS,

That is all.

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So I was in my hostel in Reykjavik, and I decided to take a shower. The showers are all in common bathrooms off the hallway. The water in Reykjavik is heated almost completely using geothermal sources, so it is always quite toasty. Sometimes it smells faintly of sulfur, though.

The shower had the normal large mosquito-catchers perched around the inside, and one large, dead spider caught between the wall and the wall of the next shower, but experience had showed these to be harmless, so I was unworried. Like most European showers, space was extremely limited, with very little room to move about. It occurred to me that perhaps this was why European women didn't shave their legs... they couldn't reach them without being a contortionist.

The shower knobs were also a little tricky: a very slight turn could mean a big difference in shower temperature, and it didn't say which one was hot and which was cold, or which way you turn them to get yourself more of either. The shower head was of the type that came off its cradle so you could hold it like a paddle.

So it was that I turned a wrong knob. The water turned very hot and started to burn me. I quickly turned the cold knob. The wrong way. The water turned scalding. There was no where in the shower where I could move to escape the stream of water. I reached up and grabbed the shower head to turn it into the wall. Instead it fell off its cradle. It hit the ground and started spinning around wildly about its cord, scalding my legs on every pass. The pain was blinding! I had to escape! I opened the door to the shower and stepped out on the the floor. I slipped catastrophically and fell against the stall door. I finally came crashing to the ground. The shower head had turned so that it was spraying burning water in an arc right out the door of the shower and onto my body. I grabbed the shower head and pointed it back into the shower. I had cut my foot all the way down the top, and it was bleeding. Another cut was between my toes and one on the bottom of my foot, perfect for the floor of a hostel bathroom. As I lay on the floor, a mosquito came and landed on my fried, red, still burning and exposed leg.
I killed it.

THAT SHOWER SUCKED!!!

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Here is Sebastian and the waterfall from the story.


And here is Sebastian above the camp.

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I'll be catching up on everyone's entries as soon as possible.
Right after I have a personal dance party.
You don't know how hard it is to go for an entire month without a personal dance party in my kitchen.

Step up, so you can get down.

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