Saturday 3 February 2001

Pic of the day: It doesn't look too bad from down here either.

Toilets and planets

Have you noticed when you yawn, there is something like a buzzing sound inside your head and you stop thinking? Well, that's the way it is with me at least. Actually I don't even need to yawn: I just close my eyes, roll them back and yawn inside my head without gaping. Well, at least sometimes it works, but sometimes I need to yawn and even stretch to get the desired effect.

But this morning, as I woke up and was very tired, I did the buzz thing. I had got enough sleep for the night, but was still horribly tired in my head. So I did the yawn-buzz thing again and again and again, and after a few minutes I felt fine. No, I don't think you can cut out sleep entirely and just recharge that way. But it helps against acute tiredness in the morning. Don't ask me why - I have even forgotten how I found out. Trial and error, I suppose.

***

As I was cooking my dinner a while later, my pious friend showed up with the toilet he had promised. Well, sort of. An acquaintance dealing in these kind of things had convinced him that oh no, you certainly must not buy cheap toilets. That's just horrible and will get you into trouble. So he had bought a somewhat more expensive one. (Let's hope the bill doesn't show up before payday, or this will be charge on my credit card for sure.)

This time, he assured me, he had prayed on the way here for a successful installation. I thought in my heart that there may be others praying for a more eventful outcome, and which would the Lord listen to? Just in case, I turned off the electric heating cables in the floor before we started to drill.

Removing the old toilet went easy enough, and we placed it outside. Then in with the new, and my friend started to drill. The landlord showed up, wondering what was going on. I told him that I had accidentally destroyed the old toilet while trying to repair it, and was replacing it with a brand new Porsgrund Porcelain brand name toilet at no cost to him. He was somewhat quieted by this, but impressed on me that the old holes had to be filled. This also came to pass. So far, so good.

The metal pipe that lead water into the cisterna did not match up. In the meantime, it was leaking. Luckily, my friend knew what to do: He called another old friend, actually one of my own old friends from "Smith's Friends". This fellow had once upon a time been a plumber, it seems. He still had loads of parts lying around, and some tools. Better yet, his son was apprenticed to a plumber who had let the boy borrow the company car, choked full with nice parts and gadgets. After a few hours we had assembled all the parts we needed, and came back. The toilet now works, and the floor is drying nicely.

Uhm, this is where we say "Praise the Lord!", right? Or at least, "it sure could have been worse". :)

***

For some obscure reason, all three of us are interested in planets. My puritan visitor tends to say "astrology" instead of "astronomy", but seems otherwise well enough informed. The former plumber has a small telescope at home and was keenly interested in some huge planet around another star. The celestial body was way too big to be habitable, so I suggested that perhaps earth-sized moons were circling it, and described some of the curious effects of living on a moon instead of a planet.

I personally wouldn't mind visiting a habitable world circling a gas giant, but I'm not keen to live there permanently. Oh, the night sky would be spectacular at times, with the big planet hanging overhead. But it would really mess with the day rhythm. The length of the day would depend on the rotation around the planet; if the moon has its own rotation too, that makes it more complex, but this is probably rare. But whenever the gas giant comes between the moon and the sun, there is a small night. These eclipses would be both more common and last longer than our solar eclipses. Our moon just barely covers the sun, while a gas giant might cover much more sky. (Depending on the distance we circle, of course.)

Of course, I'm not likely to go travelling the universe any time soon. I actually like it pretty well here. But I'm sure there are many wonders out there too. If there is a Creator, as I believe, then creating is presumably his nature. He doesn't do it just to impress us. Earth may be special, but I bet other planets are special too when you get to study them closely.

I mean, it's like ... some years ago I was back on the farm where I grew up. I had been away for a while. I climbed the steep goat paths in the mountain looming over the farm, for a while. Finally I stood on a ridge. Under me lay the valley, in so many bright shades of green; at the horizon I could see the blue fjord. Sheltered behind the ridge lay a peaceful green meadow, and a river ran through it. To me, that grassy plain was like seeing Paradise. It may seem strange to you: Shouldn't a paradise have palms and fruit trees and such? But to me there was a rare beauty, and safety, and freedom.

I bet many of you feel something similar about some special place where you grew up or where you lived at some time in your life. And I like to think that if I were to travel the cosmos, this is how I would feel about Earth. I know that whenever I see pictures from space, and see the blue and white globe hanging there, I'm overwhelmed by the beauty of it. As if I had travelled a long way sometime in the past to find this place, and now I half remember that feeling of finding it. I haven't, of course, but that's how it feels.

One day, says Galileo, a man will reach the sky
and see the world completely from outside.
And gazing down from yonder
on a world of blue and green
he will say with eyes of wonder:
I have seen, I have seen ...
my eyes have seen.

Chris de Burgh, Discovery.