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Here’s a cool sunset picture:

But wait– why is it so blue? Shouldn’t a sunset be more orange and red?

Yes it should. But this is on freakin’ Mars!

This photo was taken in mid-April by the Curiosity rover on Mars, somewhere near Gale Crater. The rover is nearing its 1,000-th day on the Martian surface and continues to do cool stuff.

Man, I love science.

Since I couldn’t schedule an appointment at the DMV, today I decided to drop in and renew my license. Interestingly, the last time I was at the DMV was to get a marriage license in 1996. The last time I went through the process of getting a driver’s license was in 1995 after moving to Colorado. In those days, licenses were valid for ten years and I could renew it online. So I’ve renewed it twice online, and didn’t have to see the inside of the DMV for almost twenty years.

I arrived at the building at precisely 8:00am, when they open. There was a line of at least 40 people– maybe up to 50– standing on the sidewalk waiting for the doors to open. Holy cow. I turned right around and headed to the office.

After a couple of hours, I went back with the hope that the initial crowd had thinned. Indeed, there were maybe 20 people waiting for their ticket number to be called. I used the little touchscreen device near the door to get my ticket, and compared it with where they were in the queue. The ticket machine was nice enough to tell me the expected wait time: one hour and eleven minutes. I hung around for maybe ten minutes to see if perhaps the estimation algorithm was wrong, but in those ten minutes I think one person was called. I walked out and went back to work at the office again.

Just shy of an hour later, I came back to the DMV. I figured I had maybe 10-15 minutes to wait. Alas, I had just missed my number being called. The number right after it was shown on the big board in the office. Argh. But surely I could point out that I had just been missed, and jump back in the queue?

I waited for a few minutes until one of the workers was free, and showed her my ticket. “I just came back and noticed that my number was called a few minutes ago. Would it be okay if I go next?”

She looked at me with a look that only a government bureaucrat could have. “Sir, you’ll need to take a new number. But don’t worry, the line is moving quickly today.”

Quickly! Ha ha! Thanks, helpful DMV lady!

Dejected, I went back to the touchscreen and printed another ticket. Estimated wait time: 38 minutes. Okay, it’s not the end of the world, and I suppose I kind of cheated by leaving the office for an hour, so I settled in to wait.

An hour passed.

I noticed on the big board that the estimated wait time for new customers coming into the office was now 1:20. As I watched with growing impatience, I spotted several ways their process is just frightfully inefficient. But then again, these people have absolutely no incentive whatsoever to speed up the process. They work their eight-hour shifts and go home, and frankly they probably don’t really care how many people they serve or how long those people have to wait.

Finally I was called to the counter. I presented all of the right paperwork and finished in about 90 seconds. No kidding. Yay, I was finished! No, wait, I had to go to another area to wait for them to take my picture for the new license.

45 minutes passed.

The woman who had been manning the camera station while I was waiting earlier had simply vanished. Maybe she was on a lunch break, or really had to go to the bathroom, or was just in a back office crying as she contemplated her career choice. Regardless, the line of people waiting for their pictures continued to grow. Eventually a guy standing next to me commented about how the line of people waiting to do the paperwork portion had shrunk to almost nothing, while those waiting for their pictures had grown. Sure enough, there were probably 3 people with tickets in hand, and 20 standing around waiting for the camera lady.

At long last the camera lady called me to the counter. She asked for a fingerprint, and I told her I’d like to opt out. (Colorado is one of only four states that requires a fingerprint for a driver’s license, and I think it’s a ridiculous requirement. I’m not a criminal, and I don’t see how my fingerprints have anything to do with driving a car.) She told me I couldn’t opt out, and that was that. I placed my finger carefully on the scanner, setting it sideways so she couldn’t get a good scan. Unfortunately she saw through that little ruse, and after a few more tries and gruff instructions about placing my finger flat and in the center and all that, she was satisfied. Click, picture, and finally I was finished.

All in all, I spent over two hours to do something that actually required a little over two minutes of my time. Absurd. I think going to the dentist is actually better than the DMV, because at least at the dentist they’re doing something.

Five years from now, when my new license expires, I sure hope I can renew it online. Twenty years between visits isn’t enough.

After six straight days of rain, last night the weather forecast called for 6-10″ of snow. Snow! In the middle of May!

Well, it didn’t turn out to be quite that much, but we got enough to make the tree branches bend a little bit. Last night around 11pm Laralee went out with a broom and knocked some snow off the big tree in our front yard.

This was how our backyard looked this morning:

By noon it was completely gone.

At least the grass is lovin’ it. And now I’m ready for some nice sunny weather.

Zack is the kind of kid who buys all of the goofy slime toys, little action figures, magnets, and so forth. A few weeks ago he ordered some “toxic slime” from someone on eBay. He loves this stuff.

The New Horizons spacecraft is about 60 million miles from Pluto and closing fast. Here’s the latest from NASA, showing Pluto and Charon rotating around each other:

The key here is around each other… because Charon is so big compared to Pluto, they rotate around a barycenter which is actually in the space between them. (Almost all planet-moon systems have a barycenter very near the center of the planet.)

It’s so cool to see these guys after almost a century when we could only see them as faint blobs of light. I’m excited for the July flyby when New Horizons is close enough to resolve surface features on Pluto. I love astronomy.

Laralee noticed yesterday that my driver’s license has been expired for about three months now. Oops.

I checked and I’m not allowed to renew it online, because it was a ten-year license, so I’ll need to go to my local DMV to go through the paperwork. I think people generally look forward to visiting the DMV almost but not quite as much as a visit to the dentist. In any case, I noticed on the Colorado state web site that I can make an appointment at the DMV to save time. Hey, cool!

I went to the appointment scheduling page to find a time when I can go.

Umm, yeah. So apparently it’s just a cruel joke. Maybe there’s one ten-minute slot available each month on the third Tuesday or something, and it was already taken. I don’t know, but this just seems silly.

I guess I should block out a few hours next week for this. Sigh.

I ordered some hard drives earlier this week and figured I’d check on their delivery status. Imagine my surprise when I found out that severe weather and a train derailment have delayed them!

Yikes.

I’m wrapping up my first season of the indoor ultimate league. This is the first time I’ve played indoor, and it’s been a load of fun. There are four teams in the league, so at the draft all of the captains decided to name each team after one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I picked Raphael.

Although we don’t have a very good record, we have a great time together. Last night after our games we headed over to a local Mexican restaurant to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, and right outside was a little pinata of… Raphael! So we had to pose with him.

Here’s looking forward to another week of regular-season play and then the tournament. Good times.

For about a year and a half, the faucet in our kitchen sink hasn’t rotated. We have two sinks, like most people, and the faucet has been stuck over the left sink for all that time. Finally yesterday Laralee said in an exasperated tone, “Why can’t we have a faucet that works?”

Since my Saturday afternoon was actually wide open (for a change), I climbed under the sink to take a look. I fiddled around a bit but didn’t see anything obviously wrong, so I decided to just take the whole thing apart to see if there was something that could be re-aligned or whatever. It turns out the faucet mount was screwed on tighter than a mere mortal could undo, and the nut was completely inaccessible to any reasonable wrench. I spent a solid 30 minutes laying under the sink wrestling with pliers, a flashlight in my mouth, to get the stupid nut off. Finally it came free (raining little bits of rust and metal in my eyes) and I was able to remove the faucet.

An inspection of the faucet showed that something was broken inside– it’s not clear what– but given my adventure in frustration, I decided we should just get a new faucet. Laralee and I headed over to Lowe’s to take a look at their selection. I think the cheap faucets are around $90; the most expensive ones are over $300. Wow. For that price, they’d better do the dishes for me.

We turned around to see an array of sinks, some of which were “complete kits” that included faucets and drains. Since our sink is 15 years old and sort of pitted and worn, we thought maybe we should just replace the whole darn thing. The price wasn’t that much different than just buying a nice faucet anyway. So we picked one, confirmed with one of the Lowe’s guys that we wouldn’t need anything else, and hauled it home.

“How hard can it be?” I said to myself. I mean, come on, you pop out the old sink, drop in the new one, hook up the water lines, and you’re done, right?

Hah.

Removing the old sink proved to be pretty simple, and we had to scrape off the 15-year-old caulk and mildew around the edge.

That took a while, but it wasn’t bad. We then opened up the new sink and discovered that the instructions in the box were completely different from the hardware. The pictures of the parts didn’t match at all; I can only guess they included the wrong instructions. Still, with a bit of poking at the bag of parts I figured out how the mounting brackets were supposed to work.

We lowered the new sink into the hole in the countertop… well, mostly into the hole. Even though 95% of sinks are a “standard size”, it turned out our countertop was not. The hole was about a quarter-inch too narrow from side to side, and a quarter-inch too short from front to back. Also, there were rounded corners on the countertop and the sink was definitely square. Sigh.

Fortunately the countertop is a cheap laminate atop half-inch particle board. I brought out a hacksaw and took care of the rounded corners in short order. Laralee was hesitant– what if our next sink needed those rounded corners?– but I told her if this thing lasts fifteen years like the old one, we’d be long gone and wouldn’t need to worry about it. Because we couldn’t really saw a thin quarter-inch strip off the sides, front, and back, we grabbed our wood files and went to work. I think it took us about thirty minutes of filing and re-measuring before we finally had a hole big enough to accommodate the new sink.

That’s when we realized that we needed caulk. Duh. We didn’t want to go back to Lowe’s, so we dug through the garage boxes and found some caulk from a while ago. Still fresh! We caulked along the edges and lowered the sink in place. That’s when I discovered that the mounting brackets wouldn’t work on the front and back, because the countertop was inch-thick particle board there. (For reasons I don’t understand, just the front and back were thick; the sides were both half-inch.) Oh well. I slapped extra brackets along the side and tightened them down, and we’ll hope the middle of the sink doesn’t bow up.

Because the locations of the drains and the depth of the new sink aren’t the same as the old, we learned that we’d need to get creative with the plumbing beneath it. The old pipes didn’t quite fit, so out came the hacksaw again, and a few cuts and hard shoves later we had the drain and garbage disposal in working order.

The moment of truth came. I turned on the water and it all worked! The new sink looks pretty sharp, too:

I asked Zack and Alex to take care of all the trash while Laralee and I cleaned up the kitchen. The boys took the enormous cardboard box to the backyard and proceeded to slash it to little pieces with a sword.

Hey, if you have a sword, why not use it?

In the end, I learned two things:

1) If you start a home project thinking “How hard can it be?” you’re already in trouble. Something that you suspect might take an hour or so will end up taking four and cost twice what you thought.

2) I never want to be a plumber.

We bought new towels. The ones in our master bathroom and the kids’ bathroom were all many years old and were starting to get scratchy and worn. I found a good deal at Kohl’s and picked up new ones for everyone. Of course you need to wash your towels before using them the first time, so Laralee did that and then ran them through the dryer. The result: a huge sheet of lint that was like a fragile towel itself.

This is just from the red towels for the master bathroom; the kids’ towels hadn’t even gone through the wash yet. Laralee decided to run them all a couple more times, and each time the lint was quite impressive. By the end we had a stack of multi-colored lint that was at least twice the weight of one of the hand towels. Most impressive. It’s also probably an indicator of the quality of the towels… hmm.