John Burridge

 We got home just as the last of the blue left the evening sky.  The moon was between Orion and Taurus.  I managed to get a wide shot with Sirius in the lower left-hand corner and the Moon on the other side of Orion on the upper-right.
 I played around with various settings.  I hadn't realized how much haze the camera was picking up, and I wish we'd gotten home a little earlier because the bluer sky would have compensated.  The best shots seemed to be with the Moon Setting.  When I tried manual settings, the shutter speed was too fast.
I tried to get a shot of the Moon and the constellation of Taurus, but the pictures didn't come out with the V of the bull showing up so well.  I think the camera's auto-focus works best when the moon is half full.

 I pulled myself out of bed this morning and tried to take photographs of Orion.

I set the camera for a 15 second exposure time, which made the stars cold and not so twinkly.
Right off the bat, I pressed a series of incorrect buttons as I felt around the camera in the dark to try to find the manual focus setting and turned off the side LCD.

I managed to get a shaky shot of Taurus (I was aiming for the Pleiades) when I tried to take one photo before the 15 seconds was up....
Because the larger LCD screen was turned off (and I still haven't figured out how to get it back on), I really couldn't see what I had pointed the camera at, and had to make a series of guesses by zooming in on Orion's belt (or in the case of Taurus, Aldebaran)
At least the night before I'd gotten an arty shot of the crescent moon.

Went to the gym Saturday morning.  It was strange to be walking down the street while Venus shone brilliantly over the eastern hills and the waning quarter moon sailed high.  Orion's faint outline faded quickly before Sirius.  To think that this time a month ago, the sun would have already been up, and the temperature would have been in the low 60's instead of the mid 40's.

20 minutes and about 200 calories on the elliptical.  3x12x30lbs on the pec fly; 3x12x30lbs on the rear delt fly.  3x12x30lbs on the triceps pull-down.  3x12x35lbs bar-bell curls.  I did a few reverse bar-bell curls, but I could feel it in my right clavicle, so I stopped.  3x12 curl-ups on the Roman Chair.

Today is a "dig through the house and figure out where various lost objects have gone" day.  Unfortunately, the last few days have been dig through the house days, but the objects (mostly papers) haven't turned up, so to we're trying a few obscure locations, combined with "what the heck were we thinking when we last saw it."

Yay?

I forced myself to get up this morning to write.  So far all I've done is make tea and look at the pre-dawn Moon, Jupiter, Sirius and Orion.  In the intervening period, the sky has grown lighter and now all I can find are the Moon and Jupiter (and Sirius if I look where I know it was a few minutes ago.