Pandemic blog 29: Neowise, custard

Comets are supposed to presage plague so I guess this one, Neowise, must have taken a wrong turn and showed up four months late? Anyway, AB and I saw it — bright enough that you don’t have to find a remote hillock with a northward view over lightless fields, you can just head over to Hoyt Park and look out over the city lights. With naked eye you can just barely see the comet, mostly in your peripheral vision; through binoculars, the tail is quite clear. AB was over the moon about it. She has seen a comet and a total eclipse in her first ten years of life; not bad!

This is my third comet, I think. Hale-Bopp, very visible, late 90s, everybody saw it. And the 1986 Halley’s, which was disappointingly dim; I don’t think I ever saw it with my eyes, but we were visiting my grandmother in Tucson and the UA observatory was letting people come in and look at Halley’s comet through their telescope, so I did that. But in the end seeing it through a big fixed scope at the observatory isn’t that different from seeing a picture of it.

After four months, I decided it was OK for me to eat purchased food again. Since then I have done it three times, and all three times it was Michael’s Frozen Custard. Eating only home-cooked food and Michael’s Frozen Custard is like the pescatarianism of quarantine. I had an idea in my mind that the second I ate a bite of restaurant food, all the weight I’d lost during the abstention would instantly reappear, like in the Simpsons episode where Barney stops drinking Duff beer but then has one. It didn’t happen. I might need more custard.