Not only is it Sunday, when I have the opportunity to sleep in a little bit, but it’s also the return of Standard Time, when I could even sleep an extra hour later. So naturally I got up at five four o’clock. I’m sure I’ll feel like sleeping late tomorrow when I have to get up to go to work. I’ve come to one very strong conclusion this morning, though: we have way too many goddamn clocks in this house. Way too many. Every time I think I’ve gotten to them all, I stumble upon another one – and then there’s still the car (which has two, but I’ve never figured out how to set the one on the radio w/o reading the directions, so I don’t bother).

I had very simple goals for this weekend. I wanted to take the mower off the tractor, put the front end loader on it so I could put the mower in the shed, and then if I was feeling really ambitious, I thought I might even put my snow tires on. So I pulled the tractor out into the driveway, dropped the mower, and went to start the tractor back up to lift the mount out of the way so I could get under there and unhook it from the PTO.

Unfortunately, at this point, the tractor decided not to start back up (no lights, no flashers – nothing).

Usually that happens because the battery terminals get all kinds of nasty and need to be cleaned up. They weren’t all that bad, but I cleaned them up anyway.

Still wouldn’t start.

What did start at that point was the rain. :fustrate:

If it wasn’t gonna start, I really wish it hadn’t waited ’til I got it outside.

So, for the first time since I moved here, my poor tractor spent its first night outside in the cold, and now instead of spending the day not doing much of anything but reading and watching NFL Redzone, I have to mess around with that and hope like hell we don’t get a foot of snow or something before I can get it going again.

If you live east of, say, Sudbury Ontario and have a clear sky this morning, you’ll get to see a partial solar eclipse at around sunrise (if you live in Africa, you’ll get to see a very rare hybrid annular-total eclipse). I’m not sure if I’ll get to see anything, because I think it’s cloudy out at the moment (too dark to tell for sure, but I don’t see any stars), and it might be over by the time the sun gets high enough to clear the hills and trees to the east of me. Oh well, I’m sure it’ll be on teevee.

The interesting thing is that while I was trying to find a satellite weather map, I stumbled upon a series of French spy satellites called Systeme de Radio Communications Utilisant un Satellite. Yes, that’s right – Syracuse (how did I not know about this?).

The Syracuse-3 (Systeme de Radio Communications Utilisant un Satellite) series spacecraft are the third-generation military communications satellites for the Délégation Générale pour l’Armement (France’s Ministry of Defense’s procurement agency).

Syracuse 3 consists of a Spacebus-4000B3 platform, hardened to resist nuclear attack in compliance with NATO specifications.

Yeah, baby. We scoff at your nukes.

If, like an idiot, you missed Mike Boettcher in Syracuse last week, you can make up for it by hearing him on “The Campbell Conversations,” which is a program on one of our local NPR stations – WRVO – at six o’clock this evening. You can, of course, listen to the live stream or go to the website and listed to it later (also available via iTunes, if you do that sorta thing). This promises to be the best episode since they had John Keeling – brewmaster at London’s Fuller Brewery.

Oh well, 45 minutes ’til sunrise. I guess I should get ready to see what I can see.

Hope y’all have a better Sunday that I probably will.