Asakiyume mita

At around 7:10 in the morning, I saw a spider clamber over this lemon. Apparently I timeshare the kitchen with a spider. It takes the wee, quiet hours, and I take the noisier daylight ones. As you can see from the photo, the spider is now nowhere in sight. It may be chilling on the far side of the lemon--maybe that's the best spot in the whole kitchen? The whole point, from the spider's perspective, of participating in this timeshare? Or maybe, aware of overstaying, it's tucked itself away somewhere else, somewhere nonkitchen.

Or maybe we don't have a timeshare, maybe we have a (much more common) spaceshare. The spider takes the small corners; I get the large expanses. Relatively large. Relatively small. Since I do use the counter, and the lemon, we may have a misunderstanding about terms. Hell, if I'm not sure whether it's a timeshare or a spaceshare or both, I can easily see room for misunderstanding.

There were two space-related news stories I loved this week. One was the story of the M.I.T. students who sent a point-and-click digital camera into space and got photos of the curvature of the earth, for total cost of just under $150 dollars, and the other was the story of the proposal to explore the oceanic surface of Titan by ship. Not sailing ship, of course (though who doesn't have that image at first?), seeing as the temperature on Titan is almost three hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit, but some kind of Major-Tom-esque tin can, floating on it.

The liquid on Titan is methane, not water, but the news story talked about how liquid methane behaves like water, raining down from the sky, forming rivers, filling up the seas.

Titan's much farther away from the sun than Earth is, so it must be rather dark there, though. If you could get out of the capsule (if you could stand on the deck of the weatherized sailing ship), would the light from the distant sun be enough to let you see the waves? Would they shine by the light of the stars, or by Saturn?