18°43" N
46°22" W
0645 UT
27.2.08
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broke my sunglasses. and i thought they'd go for a swim. i was getting all intimate with ferdinand diesel and slipped. i cut my leg on a jubilee clip and i think got a slightly less than significant bruise, and broke my sunglasses. sunglasses don't heal themselves, so that's the only real drag. another engine room afternoon was great except for that.

changed my strings. it's like playing another instrument. the old ones ryan the aussie put on in august i think sitting on the steps of the lodge. it's louder. hee hee. tonight was overcast, though the moon is finally rising later and at least part of my watch will be without the moon, which is now about half and 'it's laying on its back,' as jenny said when we were in france.

i am struck by the angle at which i see the crescent. reading in the celstial navigation training manual, there's a lot to get your head around. really funny stuff like:

101. All the heavenly bodies are at very large distances from the Earth, varying from tens of thousands of miles in the case of the Moon to millions of light years in the case of stars and planets. It is however convenient for the Navigator to think of of these distances as equaln so that the heavenly bodies can be considered to lie on an imaginary ball with the Earth at its centre. This ball is known as the CELESTIAL SPHERE.

202. In practice we know that the Earth rotates around on its axis as it orbits the sun. However it is convenient to think of the situation as seen by an observer on Earth - a stationary Earth with a celestial sphere rotating overhead.


recently i was asked if i'd seen the 'Lion King' and, actually, i haven't. apparently the stars, according to that film, are fireflies trapped in black sticky stuff. shades of the Truman Show.

Hm.

so last night i slept out on the foredeck and thought that the angle at which i view seven sisters and orion here compared to the angle from which i view them from the dining hall deck at the end of august gives me an idea just how big this planet we're on actually is. (long sentence of the day). yes, i still prefer to sleep with my head facing North. so the astounding part of all this is that like kelly (louis!) says:

we are still under the same sky.