Thursday, Oct. 21

Up late, and then did a treadmill session and weights exercises after breakfast. Didn't accomplish a lot after that before lunch. Hubbie loaded our scrapbooking materials into the van for our afternoon meeting.



The lady who rides with us arrived about 12:45, and by the time we got to the Extension Services office, another of our members had already arrived and made sure the conference room door was unlocked.



We spent from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. scrapbooking. The fifth member of our club arrived about 30 minutes late. We were all soon absorbed in our own projects...Mother continued working on pages featuring Niece's wedding last summer, and I did a couple of more pages from my 50th high school reunion celebrations. Maybe next month, we can both finish these projects and move on to something else in 2011 (we don't meet in December).



The time flew by, and we were back home just after 3 p.m. We relaxed for a couple of hours...Mother working cryptogram puzzles, while I played on my computer. Hubbie made a trip to the vet's office to pick up one of the juvenile female kittens. Both the females came into heat, and the one that lives outdoors made it obvious that she needed to be spayed. The other one lives indoors, so her surgery isn't scheduled until mid-November.



The cat was still pretty groggy when we brought her in. She tried to walk around, but kept falling over on her side, so Hubbie put her in a cage in the sunroom to sleep it off.



Later, for supper, we had leftover beef hash with fried eggs and toast. Mother went home for a while after that, but came back around 7 p.m. to go with us to a program at the college where I go to swim.



Upon arriving, we were pleasantly surprised to see that a number of trees, as well as the lamp posts, on each side of the road between the science building and the gym were resplendent in white lights. The light poles were generously wound with them, and long strings of them were suspended from the tree tops to dangling below the branches of the trees, creating a shower of lights.



A white canopy walkway leading into the gym was also ablaze in lights. All this splendor is to create a fantasy ballroom in the gymnasium to entertain the donor after whom the college is named. He and his family, as well a chosen group of monied invitees will be at the college for homecoming activities.



As we were getting out of our van, we were greeted by the speaker for the evening...a Jesuit brother, who is a Vatican astronomer. He smiled and said, "I see you're not late for class."



We were late enough, however, because even though we'd arrived twenty minutes early, the large classroom was already full of students. Those of us from the community had to squeeze in wherever we could. And students kept pouring in after we were seated. It was soon standing room only. Nearly 200 people packed the room.



The speaker's main topic was the physical characteristics of Europa, one of Jupiter's moons. He traced the study of Jupiter and it's moons from astronomers like Ptolemy, Copernicus, Aristotle, Galileo, and Kepler, who, with very primitive equipment, did a phenomenal job, he said, of getting the information "almost right," but in the end coming up with the wrong conclusions.

Various theories were put forth, from the idea that the earth stands still, and the sun and planets revolve around us, to the stars being flat discs that revolve and tumble (which supposedly explained why those bodies were brighter at times and dimmer at others), to the idea that the reason Europa is so bright is that it is piled with white sand. Finally, through pictures sent back to earth from Voyager spacecrafts, Europa's reflectivity was correctly identified as being produced by an icy crust.



This was a very entertaining speaker. Even though Hubbie and some others we talked to said his talk went right over their heads, I thought he did a good job of getting his point across in between presenting some very technical data.

We were back home from the event by around 9 p.m., when we enjoyed cups of hot chocolate, watched TV for an hour, and then hit the sack.