Woo. I guess.

Today got off on the wrong foot. Work called at 7:00 am because there was a problem. I was a bit of a nasty glitch with the e-mail system that took me most of the day to completely sort out. It made for a bit of a stressful day. And sorry, yummymommy if I seemed a bit rushed and distracted when I ran into you this morning. I was in the middle of this at the time and running from home where I'd already been working on it for an hour to the office, so I was in fact distracted and rushing.

But when I got home I got some good news. I ran into some of the restoration people and found out that the restoration work on the common areas of the building and the balconies will be done next week - just in time for Elisabeth's visit. The halls are finally painted and the new carpet goes in next week. That doesn't mean all the work is done - there are still some apartments being worked on and the lobby is going to be redone, but at least the halls won't look like a post-apocalyptic movie anymore and the dust levels will go back to normal.

And, minor aside, turns out the first few pictures I took of the Catwoman shoot were Halle Berry's double. The latter ones from where she is carrying the cat on are really her though. Guess I'm not cut out for that papparazzi job after all.

Need a new needle for your googlephonic hi-fi?

How's this for a segué from the pictures of stars back to pictures of New York? This is a moon rock kept at the Natural History Museum. It's a crappy picture, and even if it were in focus, it'd still be a rather boring picture of a rock. It's the story of the rock that is amazing. Stop and think about it. Three men in a glorified can atop a 55-storey tube full of intensely volatile supercooled gas. With math worked out mostly on slide-rulers (hands up anyone who has even seen a slide ruler, let alone knows how to use one - remember that the 19 men who died when the second narrows bridge collapsed during construction died because of a misplaced decimal place in math worked out on slide-rulers) these three men are going to be shot a quarter of a million miles up, and two of them are going to walk on the moon. Look at the moon one night soon. That disc is as wide as all of North America. Imagine Vancouver Island on one side and Newfoundland on the other. Now imagine those two men standing on it. They are the only people, the only anything alive on that globe. When they look up it's at the whole Earth, to them a disk that can be covered by your thumb held out at arm's length. One of them will break this rock off of a larger one with a hammer and bring it back. Back across a quarter of a million miles. Someone strapped his ass to a bomb and travelled half a million miles for this rock. This rock is special.