Weekend!

It is Monday night. This can only mean one thing! MY weekend is here. In my warped alternative reality Monday is Friday, and Friday is Tuesday.

Anyway I have already covered all this before. So onto the next section.

On my Saturday, I have an action packed day planned. While most of you are at work, or stuck in traffic, I will be doing something else. Unless you are retired that is. Retired people do not have to do the whole rat race thing either - unless they choose to do so.

And now it is list time!

1. Go to the credit union and pull out $1,500 in weekend fun cash.
2. Go home and stash the cash.
3. Load the kayak carrier into the truck.
4. Load the kayak into the truck.
5. Put the TEST BEER into a cooler.
6. Get the fishing pole into the truck.
7. Hook up with some frozen shrimp.
8. Drive to the Key Biscayne Causeway.
9. Launch the boat from the beach.
10. Paddle under the old causeway.
11. Fish.
12. Consume beer under controlled scientific conditions, in order to ascertain what the official beer of summer 06 will be. So far the control group is leaning towards the Summer Ale. But the control group really needs to get out on the water to put the two beer choices to the test. And by "control group" I mean me. It would be totally unethical to experiment on someone else.

The $1,500 in weekend fun cash is for the Meade LX90. I took a look at the thing today. It has the UHTC option. UHTC stands for "ultra high transmission coating". This is an optional process that Meade applies to the optical surfaces of telescopes. The standard aluminum coatings provide 76% - 80% reflectivity (depending on the wavelength of light), but the UHTC bumps that up 14% - 18% (again, depending on the wavelength of light). It amounts to about the same as bumping up the apature another 1/4 of an inch. I also discovered that the scope has what Meade calls "level north technology". I have no idea what exactly this means, but I think it means the scope can detect where north is and will level itself. Enter your zip code, tell the computer what time it is, and it aligns itself. Nifty. The guy may not include the wedge or the focal reducer, but it will come with an electronic fine focus controller, which is pretty cool.

If I were to buy all this stuff new it would cost me about $2,200. I am still iffy about the buy, but I have been looking at scopes for a while and this is a decent deal. When I went to look at it today there were too many clouds to set it up. When I go back tomorrow I hope for there to be less clouds. If the clouds are still thick then I will have to wait for Saturday to exchange the paper for some equipment.