Three surprises must make a post

1) Surprise fiction: Aubrey, Maturin and I have reached HMS Surprise, and are currently becalmed in mid-Atlantic. Not for the first time, and probably not the last.

2) Surprise food: I thought I was having chicken curry for lunch; it turned out to be lamb-and-spinach. Which is sort of a double surprise, because I didn't recollect cooking lamb-and-spinach. (Karen rightly observes that it must've been leftovers brought back from a restaurant. Indeed, I do now recollect the occasion, the company, the dish in question. But oh, it's so unEnglish, fetching food home from a meal out...)

3) Surprise astronomy: Cliff's picking me up sometime in the next half-hour or so, and we're going to NASA to view the transit of Venus. Sheesh. How cool is that? What I reckon is, if Cook went halfway around the world to see this thing, I can travel, oh, a mile from my home, give or take. (NASA. On my doorstep. *giggles inanely*)

I have seen planets damask'd, red and white

Well, actually it was mostly the sun that was damask'd different hues: red and white and actually blue too, depending on the filter. But "the sun" doesn't quite fit the metre, so. Poetic licence, not yet handed in.

Anyway: that was just the coolest thing. Venus observ'd (might also have been the subject line, but others will be doing that, so...). Also sunspots observ'd, also flares! Four times the size of Planet Earth! I don't really have the words for how cool that was. Also how generous other people are, with their eclipse-glasses and their telescopes and their time.

I used to get this excited about science stuff when I was a kid; it's nice that I still can.

Now you'll have to excuse me, I want to go read more about transits, 'til I understand why they're actually so rare...