Pointless thought of the day:

Who do you suppose it was that decided it would be a good thing for women's armpits to smell like cucumber?

Seriously.

The antiperspirant I'm using at the moment has a "green tea and cucumber" scent. I don't think that I aimed to smell like a cucumber; more than likely I just picked up the particular brand without even looking at the scent. I do that occasionally.

I'm not saying that the scent isn't pleasant, because it is. I'm just saying... cucumber? Really? It just doesn't seem like the obvious choice. I mean, I know when I think of armpits the first thing that always comes to mind is cucumber.

Ah well. As long as no one adds ranch dressing I suppose I'm all right.

----------

I was out looking at the stars for a while last night (and since my little autofocus camera can't do much about taking shots of stars, I've given you a mountain ash in the dark instead. And here I bet you thought that the photo was COMPLETELY pointless. You know, like it usually is). It was a beautiful clear sky (at least when I was out. When my father went out later the clouds had already moved in. Serves him right for waiting) and since -- unusually -- the temperature isn't minus godawful it was a pleasant night to be outside.

It's been ages since I've gone out to look at the sky, and I've missed it.

In terms of my lifetime, the sky thing's fairly new for me. Now I really enjoy going out and seeing what I can recognise in the constellations, but for the longest time I couldn't have cared less. Oh, the Apollo missions to the moon interested me on a childish scale (I wish I'd been old enough to appreciate them more when they were happening), but as for the sky itself... well, whatever. I didn't think it was worth the effort.

I'm very nearsighted, you see, and I just assumed that it would be too much trouble to try to resolve anything that wasn't within about a metre and a half of my nose.

So what changed? A couple of things, really. Specifically, the mobile planetarium and my father's telescope.

My two fans probably recall me mentioning the planetarium now and then. You can use the blog's search bar yourself if you want to see what I've had to say about it. The short version is that we have one at work, and certain parts of the year find me doing a LOT of planetarium shows. I'm reasonably comfortable with it now, but that's a fairly new thing for me too. Back before we got our own planetarium set-up, we used to rent one for a few weeks every couple of years and run masses of students through it in a short time. The shows generally consisted of some basic identification followed by some sky mythology. I knew diddly about the sky, but I had a bit of a background in mythology from back in university. As a result, my shows usually became five minutes of can anyone find Orion? followed by an hour of storytelling. Yep. One, big, massive cheat. It didn't matter, though, because I only had to do it for those few weeks every two years.

And then...

My father built a telescope.

He'd always wanted to, and once he'd retired he ordered a kit and put one together. A six-inch Newtonian on a Dobson mount, for anyone who follows that kind of thing. Which I don't. He painted it teal, by the way, but that really has nothing to do with the story so I'm not even sure why I mentioned it.

So my father had his telescope, but he didn't really know his constellations well enough to be able to locate things with it. He naturally turned to his daughter, figuring that since she'd done planetarium shows for years she'd probably be able to help him find things.

Silly man.

I went out with him several frustrating times, map and red flashlight in hand, trying to help him point his teal beast towards such-and-such Messier Object, and then I started to notice something.

The sky's not as hard as I thought it was.

It's all about landmarks. Find something you know and see how it can point you to something else. Like using the pointer stars at the end of the Big Dipper to find Polaris, except on a larger scale. Just about everything out there points to something else, and once you learn that it's really not too bad a job to learn the basics of the constellations.

Sounds obvious, doesn't it? Well, it is obvious. People have been doing it for centuries. It's just that Yours Myopically couldn't be bothered to try it before then.

There's probably a life lesson in there somewhere, but I'm not in the mood to be preachy today. You can fill in the blanks yourself if you like.

Anyway, I learned more of the sky, and as I did I started to appreciate it more. I have scads of (badly written but very enthusiastic) sky poems from back then, because it really was a lightbulb I can do this moment for me. Nowadays I can go outside, find a star picture, and immediately relate to those people who created the sky stories I'd been telling others for so long.

Or feel like I can relate, anyway.

And how do I feel about looking at the sky now? Well, it's one of the few times in my life that I really feel connected to... I was going to say the universe, but let's say human history instead because that fits better.

And it's all because my father built a teal telescope and expected me to know something about the sky.





Weird how things work, isn't it?