Prepoceros

If you want to clean a mirror that hasn’t been touched in more than two years, it’s a good idea to dust it before you get it wet.

Wednesday night’s lunar eclipse, that is. Wednesday was all thunderstormy here in Houston, and that evening the sky was still thickly overcast. I couldn’t even tell where the moon was supposed to be. Le sigh.

I haven’t seen a lunar eclipse that I can remember, but I did get to see a partial solar eclipse in elementary school. The teachers handed out dark paper glasses, but there weren’t enough, and I didn’t have anyone to share with. Instead I looked at the crescents on the ground where the sunlight shone through the trees. Still pretty nifty.

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Last week the weather warmed up to the point that my toes started venturing out of my socks, which meant they desperately needed a trim and paint job. I felt compelled to buy red nail polish, which I haven’t worn since my very first bottle of non-toxic peel-off Tinkerbell polish at age eight. My nails have been blue and silver and green and sometimes pink, but never red.

I think I’ve deliberately avoided it all these years because it’s too “classic” of a color. It just wasn’t funky enough for my fourteen-year-old self. I mean, my MOM wore red nail polish, so it had to be uncool.

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While walking your dog one night, you look up and see several points of light in a section of sky. You wonder why all those airplanes are flying so close together. Then you realize they’re stars.

So let’s say you’re applying to law school. You’ll need a resume. With a good deal of help from your computer-smart boyfriend you rework your ugly, outdated resume into one that looks presentable and is tailored for law school admission.

You’re using a language specially designed for typesetting because it produces fantastic, professional-looking documents. The law schools’ computers won’t understand this language, but you can render your finished resume in the handy Portable Document Format (PDF), so named because it allows users to transmit documents reliably between computers. Pretty much anyone can open a pdf file, and the documents look the same on any system, so it’s a great choice for a document with a lot of formatting that needs to be just so—a resume, for instance*.

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