I should start out this post stating how much of a pain switching from standard time to daylight savings time has been this year. Even though I've (mostly) gone to bed between 9 PM and 10 PM, I've pretty much been bedridden until 7 AM all week. I've also been tired, cranky, depressed, and filled with ennui, which Mark is blaming on the time change. It could also be other things, like new moon, and the Very Grey Weather we've had since about the 8th.
Thursday morning, I'd actually managed to haul myself out of bed at 5:50 AM, shower, hard boil eggs, get dressed, and pack for a day of working remotely in Corvallis. As I reached into the closet for the car keys at 6:30, I saw that the nail I usually hang them from had fallen out and the keys were nowhere in sight. I felt around the To Go Bag on the closet floor and found the nail, but no keys. I moved shoes and bags out of the closet. I got a flashlight and looked around the closet.
Mark got in on the search. There was a discussion of alternate places the keys might be, even though they should be living on their nail. I went through all of the jackets and coats I had worn in the last week. I checked under a table. Mark looked behind the boot bench. I went through my day pack. The tracking device on the key wasn't showing up on either of our phones, and there was speculation that battery was dead. Mark went through the battery basket. I looked under the couch. Mark checked under an entryway chair. I looked under the kitchen table. I emptied out my day pack. I took a flashlight, because the flashlight can help me to consciously look at things instead of glossing over them, and shone it under the TV, and by the computer monitor, and under the couch again, and into the closet, and under the front door's lamp. I took off the couch cover and looked under the couch cushions. Mark looked under the computer desk. I took off the cushions under the Stickly Chair. Mark swept under the rolling cabinet of wicker baskets. I looked in the mail basket, and the winter glove basket, and the dog toy basket. I looked at the guest room desk. Mark went through my day pack. I wandered around the living room, checking the mantle for the third time. After about forty minutes of turning the house upside down and still not finding the key, I cancelled the trip to Corvallis and remote-worked from home.
That evening, the search continued. I went into the guest room to tear apart the bed. I picked up my day pack, and saw the car keys, sitting just below the zipper along the top of the main compartment. Mercury isn't retrograde, but I'm blaming other supernatural forces for hiding the keys. Mark suggested that I get a hammer and pound the nail back into the closet wall. Which I did. A lot.
The skies have cleared up around the 13th, just in time for a conjunction of the Moon with Jupiter, and then a very close pass of the Moon by the Pleiades the next day. "I thought you said they were going to be next to each other," Mark said Thursday night.
"Well, I thought they were," I said. "I guess Earthsky led me on. They're still about as close as they're going to be on this pass."
The next night the Moon was right next to the Pleiades, and I was lucky enough to get some images of them during twilight, when the sky was still bright enough to even out the washing-out effect of an almost-quarter moon. "I thought you said you could see the Moon next to the Pleiades," Mark said when the sky was much darker.
"Well," I said, "it is. If you put your thumb over the Moon, you can see the Pleiades right over it." Mark likes to be a contrarian when I say that the Moon is next to Jupiter, and Thursday night we had a loud conversation on the deck about how apparently close planets and stars are to each other, how I think it's neat when celestial objects are in conjunction (because it looks cool and doesn't happen every day), and how Mark thinks this is like religion. I suppose on one level it is like religion, in that photographing the sky makes me feel like I'm participating in something larger than myself.
The best thing about the conjunction was that I realized that since we're close enough to the Spring Equinox for me to easily compute the sun's and moon's position on my Portable Stonehenge, I could mark the Pleiades position on the Holes, which, unsurprisingly, is near Aldebaran's position. So I did.
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