We changed our gym membership. 24 Hour Fitness is full of lines, I didn't feel comfortable locking my bike outside it, and its indoor pool has no daylight.
Gym Foofy is just a couple of blocks farther away. It's on a side street and its bike rack is immediately outside its glass doors with members walking in and out instead of in front of a concrete wall with almost no pedestrians and a lot of automobiles. So I can bike to it after work, with sneakers in my panniers.
Gym Foofy vows you never have to wait for equipment, which means that RDC and I can go together in the evenings, as we originally plotted at 24. Even after the New Year's mob (of which we were part) thinned out, evenings were a bad time to go. He would go during the day when he could schedule a free hour, and I would not go in the evenings because it was packed and I could not ride on the coattails of his discipline.
Gym Foofy has an outdoor pool, heated and open from April 1st through October 31st, for lap swim, and another outdoor pool for leisure and children, and an indoor pool with big windows. It is a 25-meter pool, rather than Congress Park's 50, but I was happy enough in Cook Park's 25 and I lost a lot more time to crowding than I will to twice as many of my inefficient turns.
Gym Foofy also costs twice as much. It provides towels, which is nice, and Q-tips, which is insane. But I can swim outdoors for six months out of the year instead of eight weeks at the city pools, not in such restrained times (all of them have the same lap swim hours, of which I could make four a week), not in such filthy water, and I can ride my bike.
Next year, supposedly a 24 will open within walking distance of Dot Org out here in the hinterlands. At that point, I will have to make a decision: if I am still going to Gym Foofy, I will allow me to keep my membership; if I am not, better waste less money at 24 where transportation won't be an issue again than at Foofy. That's good motivation to go to Foofy.
Precor Elliptical 30', and I have a complimentary meeting with a personal trainer next week.
From my semester of astronomy in high school, I remember only that it was hard (that and the viewings in our own observatory). It involved math, which wasn't my thing. I had expected to be thrilled by physics, to talk about Newton and Galileo, and was similarly disappointed by math-heavy formulas calculating acceleration--three feet per second per second? mass multiplied by what equals what?
But I still like stars and planets, and I still like Copernicus and Einstein--their discoveries, their processes, their clean deductive minds.
For some years now I have asserted that the full moon is never in the sky at the same time as the sun. I do not remember where I picked up that factoid, and I figured it was about time I researched its accuracy. This is not completely satisfactory. It does confirm that the full moon cannot be high in the sky immediately or soon after sunset, which is the gist of my assertion, but does it mean that half the moon and half the sun both can be visible at their opposite points of horizon? Most places are not so flat that you can see a full 360-degree plane.
Anyway, that search led me here, where I learned again that Venus rotates opposite to its revolution. Now I'm trying to think how that would affect weather and evolution on Earth. Oo, a science fiction "plot."
(Someone told me once that science fiction, apparently unlike all other fiction, is based on an idea. He didn't elaborate at the time, but I filled in the blanks: What if a planet had insufficient water? Dune. What if Germany and Japan had won WWII? The Man in the High Castle. I remember that morsel because even at the time I thought it was bullshit but didn't know how to assert it. What if a girl had muddy drawers? The Sound and the Fury. What if a woman's first impressions of a haughty man were wrong? Pride and Prejudice. What if Frank Cornish's secrets were finally revealed? The Lyre of Orpheus. (Perhaps because at the time I had not read these, I could not assert this?) An idea is different than a premise, but I can't think of a science fiction "idea" that's not actually a "premise," just as in straight fiction.)
How would everything had evolved differently if Earth rotated and revolved in different directions? How much does the direction of our revolution affect us? If rotation were reversed, ocean currents and winds would be different to the point of opposite, but if rotation were the same and revolution turned face, what effects on a planetary level would there be? Any, before Earth's course disrupted the solar currents?