dinner and a comet

Yesterday around noon I got an all-campus e-mail from the Physics department of my school, announcing that they'd be holding a comet-watching party at the on-campus observatory that night. This sounded interesting, so I forwarded the message to shalmestere, who (somewhat to my surprise) agreed that it sounded like fun. So after work, she drove out to meet me. We still had two hours before the comet-watching party, so we went to a restaurant one of my co-workers had raved about. It was a bit expensive, but worth the raves: shalmestere had a beautiful, deep-red venison chop with an interesting dried-cherry-and-chestnut sauce, and I had a dish of salmon, mussels, shrimp, and scallop, all of which were meltingly tender and served in a tasty concentrated broth.

Anyway, we went back to campus, returned a volume of 14th-century music to the library and checked out another, and climbed the five or so flights of stairs to the observatory (which is basically a section of attic whose roof can be slid out of the way). The friendly native guide handed us binoculars and showed us how to find the comet, which really is quite striking through binoculars. He had also trained a reflector telescope (I dunno... 8-12" diameter?) on it, but at that magnification it looked only as though the lens was fogged; binoculars really worked much better.

IRC 132(f)

A few years ago Congress passed a law allowing employers to provide tax-free fringe benefits to their employees for parking and public-transit expenses involved in commuting to work. They started with a limit of $100/month for public transit and $200 or so for parking, both to be indexed automatically to inflation; for 2007, it's up to $110/month for public transit.

( Of bureaucracies and laws )