Brief Personal Update, With Voting

Life has been busy; Nomi and I have done a lot lately -- seen plays (Hamlet, The Tempest), seen a movie (The Prestige, last night) seen friends (cellio, for one), gone to synagogue (we're sponsoring kiddush this shabbat in honor of my father's yahrzeit) -- but I've been too busy with all those things to spend much time reporting on those selfsame things here. And I've been attempting NaNoWriMo, as you all know. I started with a major push on words but have since fallen back, so I have yet to break 10,000 words. I'm hoping maybe to make a major push again today.

And, as many others have noted, today is election day. As is our habit, Nomi and I went to our polling place before they opened this morning so we could exercise our franchise as early as possible. We ended up being voters #2 and #3. There's something nice about filling out a paper ballot and watching it get slurped by the scanning machine.

I've had so many things I've wanted to write about or comment on, but no time to do so. Ah well. There will be time hereafter.

Transit of Mercury Tomorrow!

For those of you who can stop thinking about the election for a moment, be advised that there is a Transit of Mercury taking place tomorrow. The last one took place on May 7, 2003, and the next one isn't until May 9, 2016. A transit is when a planet appears to cross the face of the sun. From Earth we can only observe Transits of Mercury and Transits of Venus.

Transits of Mercury are more frequent and less exciting than Transits of Venus, so Nomi and I have no plans to observe this one live, as we did for the Transit of Venus back on June 8, 2004. (And anyway, the weather prediction for Massachusetts tomorrow is for clouds and rain.) But for those of you in our hemisphere who wish to observe it, the Transit should be visible from much of the United States. It begins at 2:12 pm EST (7:12 pm GMT) and ends close to 7:08 pm EST (12:08 am GMT Thursday). That means those of you in the Pacific Northwest will actually be able to observe the whole Transit, from beginning to end; those of us in the East Coast will see the sun set before the Transit is complete.

For more information and some nice graphics, Sky & Telescope's website has a great article: Mercury's Day in the Sun.

Election Night at the Bursteins'

At my instigation, gnomi and I took out the stuffed donkey and elephant that we had purchased at the Smithsonian Institution some years back. They wanted to see the election returns. As you can see, my donkey was delighted to hear the news about the governor's race in Massachusetts:

Dems Win!

For more adorable pictures, see Nomi's post with the cute political animals.