Cat News and World Building

Yesterday afternoon, (Friday,The Ides of Winter) was practically 70F, so I managed to get some writing done outside. I was visited by a small black spider, who seemed  to be particularly interested in my tea:  I had to shoo it out of my teacup twice.

It appears that what Smokey has been wanting the last few nights is to sleep in our bed.  When Cicero came to our house, there was a divying up of rooms and territories (for reasons that I don't understand, as at the time Cicero was a five pound kitten and Smokey was a sixteen pound cat).  In any case, Cicero somehow got our bed.  The cats get on tolerably well, although Cicero is a little too rough-and-tumble for Smokey's tastes.  Apparently, there's another territory shift going on, or the borders are relaxing or something, because after meowing a few times at 2 AM, Smokey jumped into our bed and began grooming the top of Mark's head (which is an old, familiar trick).  

There's a big wedding for later today -- one of my first cousin's daughters is getting married --  so this morning's plan is to go to the gym when it opens, write, and then go to the wedding and reception.

Saturday workout (since I'd hadn't gone since Wednesday, I decided to try for a fuller session):  30 minutes and 300 cal on the Nordic Elliptical.  Downstairs was very chatty.  3x13x30lbs on the deltoid fly.  13x(30+40+50)lbs on the pec fly.  13x(40+50+60+70)lbs on the lat pull-down.  3x14 curls on the Roman Chair.  3x13x30lbs bar-bell curls.  3x13x30lbs on the triceps curls.  Bits of free-weight work.  And now I want bacon.

On the writing front... I've hit a point where the magic user is thinking about how to do a spell, and the moons' phases could affect his spell, and I realized that if I was going to be consistant in the story, I really needed an ephemeris of the moons' and the sun's position in the sky.  The variable nature of the length of time the moons take to make a complete orbit means that the concept of a month is more fluid.  Looking back at other fantasy books, unless there's a race to get the McGuffin to the Mystic Place by the Full Moon, there's not much detail -- but it's the sort of detail that's going to shape how the characters speak and think.  

I set out to program a switching set of orbits, and after wasting some time trying to put together a web-based program on Wolfram, I reverted back to a Perl script on the iMac.  Several hours later and about 80 lines of code... I had a program that would spit out an ephemeris table.  Now I have to review it by hand to make sure it's doing the right thing (there's a state where the program will double-switch the moon's if they're haven't moved far enough away from each other).  

What building the ephemeris has shown me is that there will be a Red Moon Season, when the smaller, ruddier moon is larger (and faster) and a Blue Moon Season, when the larger moon is prominent.  Which means the story will have phrases like "Blue Moon Fortnight" (which is 14 days, like ours) and "Red Moon Fortnight" (which is a few days shorter).   So I don't go too crazy, the fantasy world's sun moves at about the same speed as ours... and I think I'm going to use a 360 day calendar of 12 months of 30 days each, with an intercalendary period just before the winter solstice.