busy doing nothing

I've been meaning to blog on here for a few days now. I had a pretty intense weekend.


Staurtday <-- this is how I just typed this, I think it's funny so I'm gonna leave it, haha :)
(there's no underline setting? darn.)
Slept in 'til about noon. Got busy stapling fliers for the canned food drive on bags. Got bored so I decided to distribute at least the ones in our neighborhood. That was neat :) 60 bags to 60 houses.  I came inside for a "break" but ended up taking a lot of time to eat and cool off. It was sooo hot outside!! I was outside for about an hour and I was sweating like crazy. Ughhh, Florida. Even right now it's 86 degrees.
Anyway, I got a call from my dad saying he would be picking me up in about an hour. Wow I lost track of time! So I took a shower and barely had enough time to get ready before he was here ready to take me to the Fak. FYI: "Fak" is short for Fakahatchee strand in the Everglades where I go stargazing on the two dark (no moon) Saturdays of every month. It's so amazing out there... It's a perfect location: far away from both Naples and Miami to keep the light domes dim, flat so there's no obstructing the horizon, surrounded by manmade lakes and limestone rock so there aren't too many bugs. Soooo many stars! And on Saturday, sooo many meteors!!!! Geminid meteor shower! :D And I didn't even know it was until like halfway through the night, lol. Charlie was there, of course. Mike was there - again, of course. Mike really bugs me sometimes :( He's really pushy and talks to me too much. Jon, from Scotland was there, and a lady named Dana who I didn't know. She had some guy with her, too. They sounded young, but they got there after dark so I don't know what either of them look like, lol. And there was an astrophotographer who was there last time, but I don't know his name. He took some really awesome pictures of the Orion nebula, with color and everything! They looked really good! He tried taking one of the horsehead nebula on Jon's scope but it didn't work for some reason. Oh well. And OMG Rick was there, with both the "binochair" (coolest thing ever!!) and his 16" telescope. 16" means the lens diameter. This thing was like 8 feet long!!! You had to get on a ladder to see through the eyepiece! Oh ya and the binochair :D it's a binocular chair. You sit down, rest your head back and use your hand to adjust where you look up and down. It swivels, so you use your feet to just kick and spin! It was better than a small telescope because you can use both eyes. I learned a lot that night. I can now collimate "my" (it's owned by the club but I use it) telescope by myself, if I have a laser lol. And... I can find some more constellations, like I learned about Orion, Canis Major, Canis Minor, Lepus, Taurus, and Eridanus. Saw five stars of the trapezium in the orion nebula, the dark bands of the andromeda galaxy and NGC 2169, aka "ICA 37" lmao. Mike tricked me! NGC 2169 is an open star cluster in orion that looks exactly like the number 37! Hence, ICA - I see a - 37. It's apparently a common joke to play on noob astronomers like me. I totally fell for it :P I barely used my own telescope out there. I spent most of the time with Rick, either looking through his gigantic scope or sitting in his binochair watching meteors :) I think he's my favorite member of the club. Well, besides Denise, she's so nice! But she never comes out to the Fak. I wish she would... Anyway, I think that this is worth mentioning: I saw a red meteor! It wasn't a geminid: it was coming out of totally opposite part of the sky. And it was huge, although it didn't go very far. But it was RED!!! And it went UP which I thought was pretty awesome. Haha I have so much to say about only a few hours! I feel like such a dork :) but I love it so much lol!!
After we left the Fak, we headed to Megan's party! Turns out it was over. Lol. Well, there were still a few people there, but most everyone had left. So us leftovers decided to go to the beach! Not just the beach but the pier! One of megan's friends from college is a physics major, when I told her I would be studying astrophysics she said that's what she wanted to study but they didn't have it! Instant buddies. XD I wish she could've been out at the Fak with me! She would've loved it. Out at the pier there weren't any lights, but the naples light dome was huge. So half the sky was pitch dark and the other was like wicked polluted. I got to show off what I learned and told everyone about the meteor shower and constellations :) Driving back was fun too, windows down, music blasting, like a late night on the town should be! Finally got home about 1:30 haha.


Sunday
Got to sleep in again! A little too late, actually. I was rushed getting ready for the concert, and my mom thought rehearsal started at 2:30 when it was really at 2. So I was really late and everyone was worried I wasn't going to be there. And on top of that, I forgot to wear black pants and wore khakis instead... which ended up making my mom miss most of the concert. AND I messed up my solo. UGH. Not a very good concert.
But after the concert was nice. My mom and I went to Lowe's to get supplies for my physics kite project! It was so much fun! We each went down a different aisle to look for something, and when I went to find her, I saw her on the other end of the rows of aisles, kind of hiding from me. So we ended up chasing each other!! Keep in mind we're in concert dress! The employees were watching us, it was great. And then we kept having to ask the employees where everything was - it was always on the other end of the store as we were on XD Fun :)
Then once we were home, we picked up the canned food donations we asked people for. We got 148 cans from only 12 houses! Out of 60 I gave fliers to. Then we looked for what we could donate! We found big bags of candy left over from Halloween :) I really hope families with kids get those. And big bags of chips, too. Grand total after we gave ours and rechecked in the morning: 185 :)