10mm

So the battery died in our 3-year-old Nissan the other night. That's a bit young for a battery, but I think accidentally running it down once last fall may have sent it on the path to an early grave. It would barely take a jump when it was time to leave Rog & Wilma's house Sunday, and it almost stalled out with lights flickering at the first stoplight -- but we limped all the way home with it, putting in neutral at every stop to keep the rpms just high enough to hold it together. Once home, it wouldn't start again for anything.

Sooooo next morning instead of going to work went to car parts store to get a new battery and put that in. Of course the bolts holding it in are 10mm -- too small for 7/16" wrench, too large for 3/8". 10mm nuts hold just about everything together these days on cars and bikes, so I have 2 or 3 10mm wrenches.

I'm annoyed that we still have both measurement systems. I'm still bitter about having the metric system drilled into my head in the 6th grade, only to have the country abandon the whole conversion because people still want to use the old system and so by junior high we were back to trying to figure out how many shillings are in a furlong and so forth, the end result being kids have to learn both systems now and every guy needs two sets of wrenches in the toolbox. Most inefficient, most annoying.

Last night caught a quick glimpse of Mars through the telescope. I missed opposition in December but it's still pretty close. Couldn't see much though. I mean, I could see both polar caps, which in itself is kind of cool, and could see some dark markings on the surface but not well enough to recognize exactly what places I was seeing.