Good Good Friday

Greetings from Hanover, Pennsylvania, where we arrived early this afternoon under clear temperate skies after a drive through the outer battlefields of Gettysburg and the town. Our original plan was to take my in-laws out to dinner, but we realized when we got here that, this being the last Friday in Lent, the local seafood restaurant was going to be absolutely mobbed, so we ate the turkey intended for tomorrow tonight and decided that we would go out for lunch tomorrow instead (with whom I have not seen in a couple of years...yay!) Because it's supposed to rain on Sunday, we will probably go to Hershey and ride the free chocolate world attraction and maybe go to the zoo. In the meantime since it's supposed to be beautiful again tomorrow we will probably drive around to see the local flowers.



Because it was a gorgeous evening, we took a walk between dinner and dessert to the baseball field at the nearby YMCA, where I astonished myself by hitting four out of five thrown balls...admittedly my father in law was not pitching very hard, but I haven't tried to hit a hardball since college, I don't think, having always played softball and that not very well. We played, walked the dog and took my younger son to the jungle gyms until sunset.



After dark we went back outside to see the isoceles triangle made by Venus, Mars and Aldebaran toward the west. We turned to see Jupiter -- two of its moons were clearly visible to the lower left of the planet through our 50x binoculars -- and the space station was passing right nearby, a very steadily moving point of light, dimmer than the planet but brighter than many nearby stars. I have only seen it once before on a night when the paper noted that it would pass right over my house. I love that. Oh! And earlier, from the same spot, we beheld Maximus the Groundhog!