mellicious: blinky holiday lights (holiday lights gif)
I don't know if today (Monday) is the shortest day of the year or if it's tomorrow, but it's one or the other. I happened to look out my balcony windows, which face west, right after sunset - it was allllmost completely dark by 6:00 - there was a very faint glow left around the tree-line, but not much. So maybe tomorrow the day will be just as short, but at least after that we know they'll start getting longer again!

Added: I looked it up - the actual time of the solstice is apparently about 10 in the morning (my time, which is Central), which I think means Tuesday's sunset will be ever-so-slightly later than Monday's, right?

Let's see, as far as reading: I finished Sleigh Bells Ring, which was very low-key and nothing at all like most Hallmark movies that I've seen. Whoever wrote that blurb I read maybe thought amping up the drama would sell better? Anyway, it was pretty good. And I finished the book I've been reading off & on with the Regency Christmas novellas, which was called
Under the Mistletoe. (That story I liked so much about the teacher and the viscount is "The Best Gift.") I have some more Regency short novels and maybe some more story compilations on my Kindle, too, so I may try to shoehorn some more of that stuff in while I'm still in the mood for it!

Somebody at work gave us both those holiday necklaces with the big blinking lights, and I draped them on the TV and put a picture
on Instagram, if you care to look. (Mostly my Instagram is full of nail polish, but I'm trying to remember to take pictures of other things!)

Oh, I almost forgot - I meant to talk about those candles I bought from an Etsy seller, which came last week and which I really like so far. I bought the one 8-oz candle and a couple of samplers with 4 2-oz. candles in tins in each set. (You can see the bigger one and one of the tins sitting in front of my TV in that picture I linked to above.) Those two both smell really good - the small one is
Wizarding Christmas (which just smells sort of generically Christmas to me, but in a good way - it says pine, fir, orange, and ginger) and the bigger one is At the Lamppost (I assume that's meant as a Narnia reference) and it smells like trees. My brain keeps insisting that it smells like snowy trees. It's blue spruce and birch, the label says. Those are trees that I associate with winter, I guess - I don't think either of those grows down here, much, so that's probably why I associate them with snow.



mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (Wonder Woman - DC)
Remember last week, when I put up that stream-of-consciousness post about the big Disney infodump and said I knew I had something I was going to talk about but couldn't remember what it was in all the excitement? (Just nod along, even if you don't.) Well, one part of what I forgot was the thing about pandemic slang that I posted the other day - and the other part was about astronomy.

Has anybody else happened to notice that there are two bright starlike objects close together in the night sky in the last week or two? I noticed it when I was taking my dinner break one day last week - because it happened to be right in front of me when I walked outside - and then I noticed it again tonight, and this time I remembered to try to figure out what it was. I did correctly assume that they were planets, not stars - specifically it's Jupiter and Saturn. (The first thing I thought of was Mars, because it's been so bright lately, but then I found it elsewhere in the sky a little later, so I knew that wasn't it.) Jupiter and Saturn are in close conjunction, from our point of view, and they will be even closer next Monday, which happens to be the winter solstice, before moving apart again.

Take a look at them this week, if you get a chance. Right now they are also close to the crescent moon, which is just cool-looking. Actually it looks from what I saw when I searched that some of the lunatic fringe are living up to their name and assuming this Means Something. But heck, it's not like Jupiter and Saturn are actually about to collide - it just looks that way to us!


Also I found this website while I was searching - the Stellarium. It didn't really help me answer my question but it's awesome-looking - and probably actually useful for stargazing!

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mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (Default)
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