In a word: Moof

Back on the mountain. We’re in the middle of the monsoon season here, so there are frequent thunderstorms. They’re short-lived and though, and can be seen from miles away. From the mountain I could see three different thunderstorms earlier this afternoon, all of them far enough away that the lightning couldn’t be heard. They’re huge lightning bolts though. All this weather makes for poor observing conditions, but terrible conditions here would be amazing conditions for Cleveland. We’re in the middle of replacing the motor on the declination axis, so we can’t do any observing anyways. Maybe later.

Random story time: the most recent visitors to the Schmidt before us were here in early July. When they left, they set the dishwasher to run. Reasonable thing to do, except that we have semi-frequent power outages. So before the dishwasher could run, the power failed, and the dishwasher wasn’t smart enough to resume cleaning. So the dirty dishes sat there for a month. I opened the dishwasher yesterday to find quite a colony of mold taking over all the plates. Not just spots, this was enough mold to make a hearty meal. So we just ran the cycle a few times with as much detergent as we could fit in, and that restored the plates to a mostly sanitary state. But the bottom line is that I don’t feel as bad for leaving dirty dishes all over the kitchen of my suite in Cleveland. They may have been dirty, but they weren’t nearly as bad as these plates.

—cts