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Sunspot #1001 did not make it all the way across the face of the sun before fading out. Even if we are getting cycle 24 sunspots now, they are not lasting very long. 1001 formed on the side of the sun that faces us, so it was pretty short-lived.
I'm starting to wonder about the predictions from some sectors of the solar astronomy field of an extended solar minimum, the kind which produces global cooling like the Little Ice Age--that would suck.
Jerry Pournelle says it would take a few years (maybe a decade IIRC) to get a "foot of ice" on the ground, and real glaciers would take "less than a century". If we are entering into a period of reduced solar insolation, we'd better hope it's not worse than the Maunder Minimum was.
I doubt we're facing an actual real ice age, but you never know. We are overdue for one....
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I got to go home early Saturday morning. Again, everything was done--as I'd ruefully predicted before leaving for work, I spent most of my night in Receiving. First I did backstock; then went to the warehouse with Patrick; and finally I did Receiving after we got back from the warehouse.
I was done at 5:20. I helped make sure the back wall and the floor were clear, and I ended up leaving at 5:40 because there was simply nothing else I could possibly do, and I didn't feel like hanging around for another 20 minutes.
The huge rains we had--over six inches since Thursday!--ended up leading to leaks in the roof, and I found one leak in Receiving. I pulled that pallet down, and put a bucket where the pallet had been, to catch the drips. Fortunately the merchandise on that pallet (bathroom tissue!) was undamaged thanks to the plastic wrapping.
Tonight I expect that I'll probably end up doing Softlines (clothing) again. Oh well. It's pretty easy, anyway--no heavy lifting!--so if that's what I'm doing, I can live with that. Maybe it'll even be cooler in Receiving now that the rains have passed. (Ha ha. Right.)
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I also finally got around to trying something I'd thought to try before I got an MP3 player.
You see, from the days before I had a CD player in my car, I have a leftover "car kit" for a portable CD player--the 12v convertor dongle and cassette adaptor. It had occurred to me several times that the cassette thingy could be used to interface my MP3 player to the tape deck in the boom box at the warehouse. (The boom box in Receiving, sadly, does not have a cassette deck in it. Damn it.)
Friday night I actually thought to take the cassette adaptor with me. And after a little bit of trouble (I had the thing in the tape deck backwards) it worked splendidly, so I think I'll keep taking that thing with me on Fridays. Heh.
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The projected high temp for today is 63°. Hopefully that's right, because I'd rather leave my window open than run the AC any more this year.
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My current D2 character, Ruinatress, has achieved 90th level, and is not likely to get much higher than that before I complete the game. *sigh*
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It's about 100 days until Christmas and the store is already getting Christmas merchandise and displays in. I can't wait to see if they assemble the "angel with trumpet" wrong again:
Heh.