work, walking and weather

Life is calm. Work is intense. For every thing I try to do, there's a problem. I manage to override the problem, but sometimes I wonder if my solutions are good ones or if I'm just applying some kind of patch which is hiding not only what appears to be the problem, but also the murky cave of Disaster and Ickyness that harbours the actual causes to the problems...? Sooner or later they'll show their ugly faces, I assume, and I'd rather it'd be sooner than in a few years from now, while facing the defense. In other words: The velocity field of the galaxy I just managed to extract in yet another way (using gaussian fitting), couldn't be used to calculate the rotation curve, because the units were totally wrong. Now it finally can. But while working on this, I did a most daring thing. I needed some chocolate, so I went and bought a Hershey's special dark. My experience with Hershey's has so far been far from plesant. The substance they produce is an abomination and shouldn't be allowed to be called chocolate (and for anyone who disagrees, lucky you, you just haven't been introduced to the real stuff yet). It tastes more like one of the grosser ones of Bertie Bott's all-flavoured beans (not sardine, the second worst). With one exception, the peanut butter cups are actually fairly agreeable. However, with enough cocoa (>50%) apparently not even Hershey can fail. It's certainly not Cote d'Or, but it stifles the worst cravings.
But, my foot inflammation that I acquired on thursday last week (by doing nothing else than walking normally - Grr! 3rd time during less than a year that my left foot has issues. Broken, sprained and now inflamed) let me know that it was still there during the walk.
Today it is grey, and this morning, I was actually heavily rained upon, for the first time this summer. It's about the 3rd rainfall for the entire summer, so it was fairly nice. The clouds are actually lowering the temperature with about 10 degrees, so it's 25 outside right now. :)

The birds are finding their way around the apartment now, but I really need to build a tree for them. Pippin is happy to jump up on my finger whenever she is lost or uncomfortable, and is totally adorable. Merry is still cautious, but gives the awesomest concerts, and his flying skills are getting better and better.

Time to get back to my galaxies. Funny telephone conversation the other day, while at work, the owners of my building called:
Anonymous Caller: "Hi this is Galaxy Management here"
Me, interrupted from working hard on preparing NGC 2903 and NGC 4096 for matlab runs: "...aahahahahahaHAHAHAHAHA hihi, hoho.,!" (etc)
Confused Person: "Why are you laughing?"
Moi, realising after a while that this is not Hildy actually trying to be funny (where would I ever get that notion from though?), nor someone I had emailed previously asking stuff about yet another galaxy: "Uuuuhm. I don't know!" (also starting to feel rather dumb)
--Profound Silence--
Person believing she's talking to the biggest moron: "so, this is about your rent.... "
And then I remembered that the place I address my rent cheques to wears the rather hybris (how make that word into an adjective?) -ized name Galaxy Management. hehe. I quickly explained what I was working on, but whatever. :)